Conference!

This weekend North Lands hosted it's annual international conference.
Unfortunately I got a bit distracted by everything going on so I don't have lots of photos to share with you.

The conference had about 100 or so attendees. We listened to some amazing speakers:

Kristiina Uslar and Richard Wheater's talks

 - Petr Stanicky who taught our class in the last session.
- Helen Maurer who taught the other class last session
- Richard Wheater the fantastic neon artist who's teaching my next class!
- Kristiina Uslar, an incredible pate de verre artist, teaching the other class next session
- Dr. Joy Sleeman, a senior lecture at UCL who deals a lot with "the place" in art (i.e. lots of site specific work, environmental interventions, etc)
- Elke Western who is doing quite amazing commission work out of the incredible German architectural studio, Derix Glass Studios
- Dr. Sven Hauschke, director of glass department at the Coburg Art Collection and judge on the panel of the Coburg Glass Art Prize
- Lisa Autogena, the artist behind the incredible Autogena Projects.

The talks were all really wonderful, all speaking around the theme of "the place and work".


We had a really great time at all the meals. It was a fantastic chance to meet lots of international artists, curators and educators. (Of course, I kept getting myself into silly conversations with terribly important people, like the director of the V&A, or the founders of Bullseye Glass, without realising who I was talking to, and probably made a fool of myself a number of times!)

At both of the dinners we had really great Scottish entertainment from the local area, like singers and dancers. We had a bit of a traditional dance night too which was great fun. The Scottish dancing is mostly similar to Aussie barn dancing, as far as I can tell, so I was well prepared to strip willows and swing around partners' elbows. A VERY kind bloke even taught me to waltz.

Richard's class starts this morning. We had an orientation dinner last night to meet our class. I'm super excited! We pestered Richard a little to know what we'll be doing, but he's playing it coy just at the moment, so none of us quite know what to expect.

Very keen to get right into it :)