Mura: Where Venice Meets the Valley
There is a stretch of river in Cragg Vale, Hebden Bridge where history is unearthed.
During lockdown, when the world had shrunk to one daily walk, my husband Sim, our dog Juno and I came to know that stretch of Cragg Brook well. We walked it in every weather at every time of day. And that river kept leaving things for me to find.
At the time I was listening to Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem; her account of walking the Thames foreshore in search of what the river gives up: clay pipes, Roman pottery, Victorian pins. I dreamed of finding my own treasures and Cragg Brook delivered. Fragments of ceramic beer bottles. Inkwell stoppers. Teapot spouts.
One day I found two pieces of patterned glass, small enough to sit in my palm. I took them home and I put them on the little shelf in my kitchen, alongside shells and feathers and other small rescued things, and I half forgot about them.
They sat there for a few years.
Then one day, looking for a spark of inspiration, I picked them up again. Held them to the light and looked closely at the pattern pressed into the surface. Then I started researching, following threads from Victorian glassmaking to industrial production to the mills of West Yorkshire.
The fragments are Victorian privacy glass; glass with a pattern rolled into it during production, not purely for decoration, but to obscure. To let light through while keeping peeping eyes away. The specific pattern is called Muranese, first produced around 1890 by the Glasgow Plate Glass Company, on Murano Street in Glasgow. And Murano Street was named after the Venetian island of Murano, the island that has been synonymous with glassmaking for centuries.
So in the name of this collection; Mura, is a link across centuries and countries.
When I came to make the collection, I started by creating my own versions of the Muranese pattern, translating those roller-made shapes into something I could work with by hand. Then I began piercing them, cutting them from sheets of brass and silver, following the lines of the pattern with a saw blade, removing the negative space.
Those negative spaces turned out to be the whole point. They create shadow. They let light through in a particular way. They make the piece behave differently depending on where you are in relation to it, how the light falls, what lies behind it.
Which brought me back to opacity. Privacy glass obscures. For the unique gemstones in this collection, I wanted something that worked in the same way, set behind the pierced metalwork, they catch the light through the cut-away sections of the pattern, so that from certain angles, in certain lights you can see the ghost of the geometry through the stone itself.
A small echo of what the glass was always made to do.
The name travels from Venice to Glasgow to a Yorkshire brook to now. I don't know whose hands last held that glass before mine. I don't know what room it lit, or what it was keeping private, or how it ended up in the water. But I know what it became.
