Perfect spot for a glass studio - clearly

An artist of international repute is setting up a new glass studio in Wanganui.
Claudia Borella and her partner, Andres Salinas, a senior lecturer at the Wanganui School of Design, are adapting a former woolstore in Nixon St into a glass studio with kilns.
It may also house Barbara Bullock's glass bead-making operation and a business support centre for computer graphic design graduates.
The two took ownership of the large Wanganui East building in the middle of last year.
Borella has been working in glass since the 1990s and her distinctive artworks are in the homes of the world's rich and famous.
British singer Elton John, for example, owns three pieces.
She and Mr Salinas are keen to nurture new talent.
"We both want to mentor serious artists that want to follow a career in either glass or graphic design."
Wanganui's laidback pace would give them and their visitors the affordable lifestyle and uncluttered time needed to develop work, she said.
The studio will also be the base for Borella's business distributing the Bullseye Glass that she works with throughout New Zealand.
The glass is hand made in Portland, in the United States, and is used for fusing and casting.
Worldwide glass artists will also use the large new space.
The next Tylee Cottage artists-in-residence, Cobi Cockburn and Charles Butcher, arrive shortly to do just that.
And Borella gives a workshop in the pate-de-verre glass technique for eight New Zealand students today as part of the Whanganui Artists' Open Studios event.
She specialises in creating shapes out of glass and fusing them together and said her slowly evolving forms explored symbols and metaphors and the language of different cultures.
"My work encompasses all the places I have travelled, such as Japan, and my own Italian heritage.
"Over time they have evolved into a story that suggests a journey."
Her biggest artistic thrill was in 1998, when she was given US$1500 worth of Bullseye Glass and three months to make works for an exhibition.
Canberra, Australia, was where she learned to work with glass, and she graduated in 1995.
Then during the early 2000s she spent3 full-time years teaching at what is now Whanganui UCOL.
In 2004 she resumed full-time art practice, based during the summers in the old Chronicle building in Drews Ave.
The Nixon St building, as yet unnamed, is to be a long-term workplace.
She's been told it used to be a woolstore and has also been a venue for dances and trade fairs. She would like to hear from anyone who knows more about its history or has old photographs.