Sarah Mayhew Craddock steps into Helen Slater’s mysterious world

What lies within is the question on everyone’s lips as they look at and consider Helen Slater’s intricate glass sculpture.

The mid-career Oxfordshire-based glassmaker Helen Slater works out of her studio in Kingham, near Chipping Norton, when not studying at The Royal College of Art in London, or teaching at Oxford Brookes or De Montfort University.

She is now presenting a collection of predominately new work created over the past 12 months in an exhibition, The Magic of Trees, at Art Jericho alongside works by painter Rose-Marie Caldecott, and photographers Ben Ramos and the gallery’s director, Jenny Blyth.

Encased within layers of glass are painterly pictures and ghostly drawings, memories, imagined places; fired, encased and encapsulated. The majority of the images appear as black line drawings embedded in transparent glass and often, contrastingly, coloured glass that verges on garish.

Frozen in time, air bubbles in Slater’s glass sculptures breathe life into the artist’s carefully crafted still images through a technique that Slater has created using a painstaking method developed and perfected over the last five years of her creative practice.

Jenny says: “Helen is both artisan and artist. She has developed a creative process unique to her, combining drawing and glass making. She etches drawings into dry cast moulds and into these excavations she pours powdered black glass, a little like gunpowder, firing it in the kiln beneath a layer of glass frits. Once cooked she breaks away the mould to reveal her fired drawings. Layering these drawings into glass, her landscapes evolve.”

Slater’s intriguing narratives float, suspended in time echoing the same kind of nostalgia as a vintage snow globe acquired at an antiques market might. The artist’s images or stories belong to someone else, yet are sufficiently malleable as to open up to one’s own personal narrative and interpretation. Expanding on the content of her work.

She explains: “The works shown are a continuation of themes exploring the associations and resonance, which spaces, places and environments can hold. I am particularly interested in memory and the capturing of these emotive responses in relation to place.

“My current work looks at how we perceive and remember places and environments specific to us. The fact that we are able to bring associations to these places and settings, which retain a resonance through our lives, is of interest to me. These places reference a place that can be read as personal or generic, to which the viewer can bring their own associations.”

When asked how the other works in the exhibition relate to her work, she says: “When Jenny and I discussed a show, it was always with the notion of having wall mounted work to complement the glass sculptures. It was Jenny who suggested the enchanting paintings of Rosie Caldecott.”

“I have my heart in landscape and am drawn to art that celebrates the natural world albeit not exclusively… I am showing a small selection of trees that I have put together over the past couple of years.”

The title of the exhibition, The Magic of the Trees, was decided upon as it encapsulates the notion of the emotive relationship that so many of us share with the landscape; a sentiment echoed by all four of the thought-provoking artists exhibiting in this show.

Where and when
The Magic of Trees continues at Art Jericho, 6 King Street, Oxford, until March 13
artjericho.com