Cathryn Shilling

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Warp weft stitch thread 2021

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Cathryn Shilling’s years in graphic design allowed her to develop skills in a wide range of creative processes and products, and enabled a natural and spontaneous move into glass. For her, kiln formed glass has proved to be the perfect medium, allowing for creative and technical freedom and enabling her to produce works that are tactile, intriguing and enduring.

 

Cathryn is best known for her trademark glass cloth pieces which utilise the Venetian glass cane techniques. The canes are made by drawing molten glass into fine threads of no more than one or two millimetres.  Cathryn uses a painstaking process to bring these together, strand upon strand, and then fuses them in the kiln until they resemble sheets of woven fabric.

 

These are then re-fired and shaped while hot by moulding, bending or draping, to become three-dimensional artworks ranging from free-standing sculptures to opulent bowls edged with gold. The vibrant surfaces of these pieces move and shimmer, exploiting texture, light and colour in surprising ways and evoking a sense of movement within the object as if the glass fabric were gently blowing against a human form. 

 

Body posture and the position of a person in relation to others is an important indicator of 

feelings, attitudes and moods. These physical expressions may reveal our true feelings by signalling the differences between what we say and what we mean. 

 

The language of movement can be far more expressive than the language of speech. 

These standing forms pieces are essentially anthropomorphized - as human interaction, interplay and movement are at the core of this work, derived from reality, performance and the infinite nuisances between those two states.