Isle of Wight Studio Glass

A gentle sea breeze swishes through the beds of shrubs and semitropical palms that line the pathway to Isle of Wight Studio Glass in St Lawrence. Overhead, puffy clouds float across the coastal landscape, and ozone spices the air. At the centre of the scene is a 300-year-old solid stone barn, which is HQ for master glass-maker Timothy Harris and his team of five craftspeople.
 

Timothy is a master of technique, the leading artist at Britain’s largest studio glass workshop. He started making glass as a teenager (he’s now 47), inspired by his late father, Michael Harris, who co-founded Mdina Glass in Malta in 1968. ‘In the mid-Sixties, Dad was head of the glass department at the Royal College of Art. He had the best job in the country but he wanted to make his own glassware.’ The Maltese government was offering tax breaks to companies willing to train local people in new skills and so, with £5,000 of savings, Michael moved his family to the Mediterranean to set up a studio.
 

At 17, Timothy went on a year long course at Brierley Hill glass school in the West Midlands, where he was exposed to traditional English glass-making techniques. Two years later, he became a full-time apprentice at the Isle of Wight studio. It wasn’t all plain sailing. ‘Dad was a perfectionist, a hard taskmaster whose motto was, “Our best work will be done tomorrow”.’

His efforts paid off – in 1990, Timothy was awarded a grant by the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust. ‘It allowed me to spend a few weeks studying at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, which was completely absorbing,’ he says. A year later, he returned to the school as a technical assistant to some of America’s top glass artists, followed by a stint at Seattle’s Pilchuck Glass School, which was founded by renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly. He was invited to stay but family and the Isle of Wight pulled him back.

New ranges
Michael died in 1994. By that point, Timothy was running the hot shop and designing pieces, alongside his brother Jonathan and Elizabeth, whose love of flowers is evident in many of the ranges. Jonathan left to set up his own glass business in Ironbridge in 2000 but Timothy has continued to produce Isle of Wight Studio Glass designs. He develops a new range every six months and an annual body of work for the studio’s Collectors Club. Very reasonable prices for smaller pieces such as paperweights (£10) or pears (£30) make it easy to start a collection. ‘Many of our most avid collectors started with a mushroom or a bird,’ says Timothy. 

The more complex designs, such as ‘Undercliff’ (introduced in 1987), ‘Nightscape’ (1988), and ‘Flower Vase’ (2001) are generally made by Timothy himself. His favourite items to create are the individual graal and cameo pieces, which involve a lot of highly-skilled work, applying powdered enamels to the hot glass to create layers of colour and carving into them once cold. These are the most collectable too, and are snapped up almost as soon as they are made. 
Timothy loves the relaxed pace of island life and the coastal landscape, which constantly feeds into his work. ‘We have very good, clean light here, and there are no distractions. You bury yourself in glass-making, with all the inspiration that comes from being on the island. I hope Dad would be proud that I’ve carried on being innovative with the material. I’m always thinking about glass – it’s at the forefront of my mind. It always has been.’

Collecting Isle of Wight Studio Glass
AR expert Mark Hill is a keen collector of contemporary glass
‘Compared to ceramics, glass is completely undervalued,’ says Mark Hill. ‘For a few hundred pounds you can have a piece of art in glass.

‘Michael Harris was a very skilled glass-maker. Timothy is a supreme technician and he has an incredible touch too, an artistic touch that is part of him, not something that can be learnt.
‘Timothy is a world-class studio glass artist in his own right. I’m most excited about his graal and cameo pieces – the techniques are very complex and time-consuming.