“Here be Dragonglass” is the creation of local artist Ric Raithby – the Illumin Artist. Here is his story.
Ric – a glass artist for over 40 years, has put on an other-worldly display of upcycled glass sculptures and hanging sun-catchers.
“I have been on a journey to see what can be achieved with offcuts of unusable and throwaway glass. The Egyptians used glass in their jewellery, and the Romans were able to make ornate bowls and urns with this amazing material. Today, we take glass for granted, and we use it in our windows and doors, with its invisible properties allowing light and vision through it while keeping warmth inside and the wind and cold outside.
I love the challenge of creating works of art from this free and abundant material. Sometimes I will start cutting, chopping and arranging pieces of glass until a shape starts to emerge. This can then lead to other designs being created because of that.
My Dragonglass range was born in the lockdown of 2020 after trying to add colour to my glowing clear glass shard sculptures. I spent months trying to find a process of swirling colourful glass paints, but most of the time the samples ended up looking a muddy mess. I must have made hundreds of samples up, with failure after failure. But I didn’t give up. I just kept thinking that if I could find a magic formula, it would be like finding a cave full of gold. I kept all my failed samples so that I could identify where I was going right and wrong. Then one day in February 2020, the low winter’s sun came beaming through my studio window, and made one of the samples burst into life. Tiny kaleidoscopic colours were radiating out from the brown slurry of dried test panels. I feverishly started going through all my samples, cutting out all the sparkling bits, and then glueing these up between another piece of glass to form a ‘sandwich’. It was then that I discovered a completely different direction, and so the last 5 years have seen me making my bespoke creations of Dragonglass! I learned from the failures and also from the successful tests, and so I started working with that. I didn’t find the pot of gold I was looking for, but what I did find were diamonds!”
Ric’s display is on until 7th March.
