Visiting glass artist’s ties to Whanganui run deep in New Zealand Glassworks residency

Glass artist Vicki Fanning is creating a new body of work as New Zealand Glassworks artist in residence. Photo / Bevan Conley

Vicki Fanning has found her connection with the city run deep.

Fanning is spending this month at New Zealand Glassworks as its 2023 artist-in-residence.

She initially studied ceramics in the 1990s but then studied glass at Whanganui Polytechnic, graduating in 2004.

However, she said her connections to Whanganui and glass go back further than her studies, as both her grandfather and dad have lived in the city.

“My grandfather helped set up the Wanganui Glass Company which is where they etched and stained doors,” she said.

The company was the main producer and distributor of etched and sandblasted doors and windows in New Zealand, operating out of its Keith St factory from the 1920s until it ceased operations due to a merger in the mid-1980s.

Her father also had ties to glass, as his job involved grinding down Brazilian quartz, a natural glass, to make oscillators for telecommunications.

This also linked to her interest in glass’s role in communication, a core component of her work, which she said goes all the way back to stained glass windows, being one of the first ways people were able to display messages to each other.

Today glass was still crucial to communication thanks to fibre optic cables, to the point she described us as living in a glass age, but its role in society still went largely unnoticed.

“It’s not a seen material, it often goes under the radar, so that’s the sort of thing I like to play with.”

Her works utilise a combination and process of various materials: clay, borosilicate glass and silicon.

They are often comprised of many strands of glass, or silicone, including her newest work on display at the Glassworks, Scarf and Hat - a scarf and hat sculpture made out of borosilicate glass and silicon.

She made the piece to play with ideas of glass being hard and ideas about illusions of safety, with the glass having a fabric-like quality to it.

“Glass is the joker, glass plays all these tricks,” Fanning said.

“A scarf and hat keeps you warm, and a blanket can make you feel safe but it doesn’t actually make you safe ... which is like windows.”

Windows gave people a sense of safety as well, she said, but this came with transparency of them and the risk of them breaking.

She had applied for the residency as she had been hoping to develop a new body of work around stained and blown glass to display in a new exhibition.

With this, she has been playing with other properties of glass, especially reflection and refraction, as well as commenting on the information that is stored in the glass cables.

“The installation I’m doing for the residency is a multi-faceted platform or cloud.”

The residency had been great for her as it had allowed her to fully devote herself to work in a way she wasn’t able to at home.

“The opportunity to have [the residency] is incredible,” she said.

“I feel very lucky and very honoured to be able to immerse myself, just take that time to really immerse myself in my work,” she said.

For the rest of her time at the Glassworks she would be looking to finish more pieces for her next installation, as well as gaining knowledge on how to operate the hot shop of a glassworks.

Finn Williams is a multimedia journalist for the Whanganui Chronicle. He joined the Chronicle in early 2022 and regularly covers stories about business, events and emergencies. He also enjoys writing opinion columns on whatever interests him.