Gordon Studio Glassblowers: A Short Film
A short film by Charlie McGowan.
Grant Donaldson “This is our studio in Red Hill in Victoria, Australia. We've been here for 20 years. Initially we were in Numurkah where we had our dairy farm, and we built the studio originally in a shed. In 1994, we moved down to the morning to Peninsula, sold the farm, and built a studio in Rosebud, which we had for six or seven years, and then came to Red Hill here.”
“After finishing school, I knew there was more to the world than being in Melbourne, so I went jackarooing and really enjoyed the freedom, I guess, the challenge of working out on farms on your own and learning about nature and animals and plants. I went to agricultural college and got a job in Tasmania, and that's where I bumped into Eileen. And so, the first time I saw Glassblowing was in Tasmania, in a shed at Clarendon. I was amazed by how the glass was manipulated and made. It was fascinating.”
Eileen Gordon “My mum and dad, Alasdair and Rish Gordon were both glass engravers. They started in Edinburgh, and when they graduated, ended up working for a glass factory in Norway where they stayed for 16 years. Then when we all hit high school years, teenage years, they moved back to Scotland and my father got a job for one of the glass factories.”
“That point I was finishing high school, and I decided that I would like to follow in their footsteps and applied for a few courses or colleges that did glass and ended up down in England in the West Midlands, which is where all the glass factories are in the UK. There was a specialised course for a year that started off, it was a trade school for all the apprentices in the factories, but they did a full-time course for studio glass. Once I found the hot shop, the Glassblowing Studio, that was me hooked. I was not going to be engraving anymore, I was making glass. Soon after my dad actually was invited to come to Perth WA and he was one of six artists from Perth, Scotland to come out to demonstrate their craft. And while he was here, he was asked if he would like to come out here and set up a studio, and they would sponsor him. So, that's how we ended up in Australia.”
“It's a humbling experience in the way that if you don't keep control of the glass, it'll very quickly take control itself. And before you know it, it's a disaster.”
“It is a very challenging medium to work with, and it is quite a long learning process, and you never stop learning. You can see a lot of work out there, or even in the history books, you can see pieces and you sit there and try and work out how the hell they made that, what technique did they use and how did they get to that point?”
Grant Donaldson “You can walk into the studio in the morning and wherever your head's at, you can sit at your bench with a big gatherer of glass on your pipe, and you'll have to get in the zone with the glass. You don't sort of do it halfheartedly. It'll turn around and bite you. It'll burn your hand off or if you're not paying attention that it'll burn somebody else off. You are totally focused on the glass as soon as you've got a pipe in your hand.”
“I've seen in books that it's been going for about 5,000 years. They used to wind glass around ceramic sticks to make little vessels. We certainly appreciate the history the skills of people in the past that have brought us to this point.”
“There's all kinds of inspirations all the time. It's a blend of a lot of things. I think it's the environment, things that you see. It can be colours of whatever, anything – colour of a car or a sunset or a flower that you think, oh yeah, those colours really go nicely together. An idea can spark into your mind at any old time, and you've got to try and hold onto that thought. I have lots of books with little sketches in it that seem meaningless, but sometimes they lead to something and sometimes they don't. But their inspiration comes from all sorts of different places, for me anyway.”
“So I guess how I came into glass was obviously through Eileen, but also a need to make money. We had to feed kids and pay the rent, and I thought glassblowing was a lot easier than farming, believe it or not. So, yeah, I say to people, I fell into a burning ring of fire and the flames went higher, and once I was in the burning room fire, I've stayed.”
Eileen Gordon “It's such an exciting material and it's hot. It's fire. It's moving. Once you have a go at glassblowing, you kind of get addicted; it's no going back, I think. It's a beautiful material to work with. I think once you're in that, the art world, you train yourself, it's part of the job to become aware of inspirations around you. The more you work in the field, the more you are aware of everything around you, and you are always looking for ideas. You're always looking for a little thing that's beautiful. You can pick up a shell on the beach and just look at that pattern, that'd be lovely to put into glass. These days when people are building these very bland homes with very bland colours. I think glass has come into its full glory for these homes. So, we often get asked to make beautiful feature pieces just to put a piece of colour in their home.
“I'm getting to the stage of my life where my body's getting a bit tired, it's wear and tear, and I'd like to just concentrate on just doing what I want to make, and that's much more than everybody else wants me to make.”