Emma Crichton-Miller discusses Anne Petters work for Collect 2020 in Crafts January/February Issue No. 282.
One of the most influential players in the history of late 20th-century art glass has been the glass production company Bullseye. Set up in Oregon, USA, in 1974 to produce colored glass sheets for stianed-glass work, in 1981 it developed the first reliably compatible sheets of differently coloured glass for artists to work with in the kiln. As a consequence, a notable feature of the last 40 years has been the rising popularity of kilnformed techniques such as slumping, fusing, and kiln-casting as well as other casting techniques.
This year Bullseye Projects will show the work of Anne Petters, who discovered glass as a medium while on a walking holiday in the Bavarian Forest. There, she stumbled upon the many long-established glass factories in the region 'and instantly fell in love'. Over the last seven years she has evolved a techinique, based on pâte de verre, for shaping glass while in the kiln into diaphanous rippled sheets similar to paper, with marks like writing on them using a type of frit manufactured by Bullseye. 'The frit looks llike ice. And my work is quite conceptual. It is about freezing thoughts,' Petters says. 'A lot of my work is about freezing ephemeral moments, wanted to have control. Glass is interesting in that respect. It enacts the metaphor of freezing something that is liquid and flowing, but it is also inherently frigile and ephemeral.'
Read more and subscribe at: https://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/magazine/issues/crafts-magazine-issue-no-282/.
