bodner051

I mentioned in my last post the great provenance provided for a recent acquisition by a catalogue from the first Philips Studio Glass Award exhibition in 1984. Here's a piece of Chuck Simpson's glass I purchased recently, which also has a great confirmation of its provenance. This is clearly signed  'Chuck Simpson', so there can be no doubt who made it. But Chuck Simpson made glass at Byron Bay in Australia before he came to Inglewood with Lesley Justin in 1987, and he made glass at Eumundi in Queensland after he and Lesley, by then his wife, returned to Australia in 1990. It is typical of glass he made at Inglewood, but it is great to have its New Zealand origin confirmed by the marketing card that came with it.   But that is not the first Inglewood piece to have come with its own marketing card.  The piece to the left is signed 'Glass Art NZ', a name which seems to have been used both by Chuck and Lesley Simpson and by Andrew Williams, though that is ...

Mel Simpson was one of the pioneers of studio glass in New Zealand, and one of the founders of the NZ Society Artists of in Glass (1980), which continues today as the national glass artists' organisation in NZ. Mel learnt his glass-blowing in the USA at UCLA (1975), having gone to the US to do a post-graduate design degree (Illinois 1974), but he discovered glass while he was there. His first degree was BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland (1971) and he returned to Elam to teach. He established the glass facilities there with a QEII grant in 1978. Ann Robinson, Garry Nash, Peter Raos and others were all students of his there. He received two further QEII awards in 1981 and 1983, and exhibited widely in NZ and overseas between 1980 and 1993. I was pleased to acquire this piece of Mel's on TradeMe recently. It is signed MEL SIMPSON 1979, making it one of the earlier pieces of his that I have. It's a thick walled, heavy circular vase, with an integral '...