NZ Society Artists in Glass Conference at Glassplant, Inglewood April 1983
The New Zealand Society of Artists in Glass was founded in August 1980 at the first New Zealand Glassworkers' Symposium held in Taradale. The next year the first NZSAG Conference was held at The Hot Glass Company in Devonport. Since then, NZSAG has held a conference every other year, where glass artists meet to discuss and demonstrate their work. An important element of these conferences has often been the invitation to international glass artists to come to talk, to teach, to demonstrate, as one way for New Zealand artists to augment their skills. The Devonport conference was attended by Americans Richard Marquis and Ed Carpenter, in hot glass and flat glass respectively. In April 1983 NZSAG held its Conference at the Glass Plant in Inglewood, the studio of Tony Kuepfer. This coincided with the holding of the first major exhibition of art glass in New Zealand, Pacific Glass '83 at the Govett Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth. The exhibition and the conference marke...