bodner051

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...

My latest TradeMe purchase is a paper weight made by Tony Kuepfer - it is signed AWK, though not dated.  I have a number of paper weights Tony made, but this one is unusual in that it has the form and features of a head.  I asked Tony about it, and he told me that whilst he can't remember the exact year, one Easter in the early 1980s he made 6 or 8 of these, which he called 'Easter egg heads'.  The glass is deep blue, with the 'hair' made with the silver chloride colouration Tony liked to use around that period.     Other paper weights Tony made at this time include these three.  The one on the right is signed AWK NZ '79, the one at left is signed AWK '79 NZ, while the rather splendid larger one at the bottom is signed AWK '80

I recently had a tussle on TradeMe with my Australian competitor 'Slumbum'.  Stephen is a keen bidder on New Zealand glass, while I do my best to keep pieces in New Zealand.  Opononi trader Tigerlillie advertised a piece as being by Keith Mahy, with an indistinct signature but probably dated 1990.  'Slumbum' and I both realised a signed and dated piece by Keith from 1990 was unusual, and so we went for it.  He pushed me a bit, but I succeeded in the end.  We more than doubled the reserve, which no doubt pleased Tigerlillie.  In the meantime I had emailed Keith to seek verification that the piece was his.  Alas, after I had won the auction the reply came that it was not a piece Keith recognised as his work. So I waited curiously to see what it was.  To my delight, the signature was one I recognise readily - now, though I wouldn't have known it until recently.  In that curious way whereby once you see one piece, others turn up, it turned out t...

A mistake I made in my article on the history of glass in New Zealand came home to haunt me the other day.  In New Zealand Glass Art I described Inglewood glass artist Chuck Simpson as being Canadian.  A trader on TradeMe offering a stoppered bottle by Chuck (at right - TradeMe 428728782) apparently followed my mistake by saying Chuck was Canadian.  I'm not sure where I got the idea from, but I was wrong. A fascinating article about Chuck Simpson's glass appeared in the Australian journal Craft Arts International (32, 1994-5 p79).  It included biographical information indicating that Chuck was born in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, in 1944. He got a Bachelor's degree in Education in Pennsylvania, and then taught secondary school for fifteen years, mostly in Victoria, Australia.  In 1985 he began working in the hot glass studio of Colin Heaney at Byron Bay in northeastern New South Wales, before moving to New Zealand and leasing Tony Kuepfer's studio at Ing...