Art of Glass with Simon Holliday
Hi, my name is Simon Holliday,
I'm a teacher here at the University of Portsmouth in the School of Health and Care Professions, specifically in Nursing teaching team. But I'm here today to talk about my work, which I'm very proud to display here at the University of Portsmouth Library, a project of work which I broadly called Art of Glass, which is a collection of work which I've made using mostly using found sea glass, some people refer to it as sea glass, and lots of small sculptural objects
which are at most reimaging what the objects might have been before they were broken.
So I've been making all these objects out of sea glass and in some respects it's the glass itself, which is which I find really beautiful material kind of lends itself really well to certain shapes, or sometimes I find certain shaped piece of glass and it kind of almost inspires me
to make a particular object from it. Or sometimes I just experiment with putting the glass together and just seeing what comes out and in some respects kind of playing with the idea that it could be reconstituted back to something that it once was. And there's other found objects as well.
So this is kind of a tendency that I have, which is almost like a childish tendency to want to pick things up and bring them home. And whereas a child I was probably always told to throw it away and as an adult I let myself keep it and play with it and build new things out of it. And that's how this kind of body of work
has just come about really.
Probably best described as a body of sculptural work which I've been constructing using found objects. This project is born out of my habitual tendency towards beachcombing. In particular, this tendency to collect objects of interest from the shoreline around Hampshire. The pebbles and mud around Southampton Water, the River Hamble and Portsmouth Harbour where I most often go beach combing are rich sources of human rubbish. And within me there resides that childish tendency to pick up and then like a magpie, to want to keep and hoard all of the curious objects that I find.
Everything that sparkles and shines, everything unusual, or things that become repetitive and collectable… glass and pottery, tiles, rope, cigarette lighters, toys, bones, fossils, and when I’m lucky… clay-pipes or stone-age tools. Therefore, within this work there is an element of indulging that inner child who would have been told, “No, you can't bring that home! Throw it away!”. So that as an adult, I've given myself permission - and space in my garage - to bring those things home, to collect, to sort, to esteem and value - to reuse and recycle. The glass has been a natural and obvious material to work with because of its inherent beauty, tactility, translucency and form. Sometimes the shapes of the broken fragments have inspired the works, or sometimes the works have developed organically or experimentally.
