Alison Lowry is a glass artist based in Northern Ireland, she enrolled on an art course and focused her interest on textiles, a craft she is rather passionate about. She concentrated on creating textiles work for two years however in her last year she became very interested in glass and turned her focus towards glasswork. Alison is influenced by three other artists: Louis Bourgeois, Clifford Rainey and Silvia Levenson
Alison had an interest in using imagery in her work and decided to make decals which she then applied to glass. She made a small series of cast kiln glass blocks and she entitled it “Triptych of life” , it was three kiln cast blocks of glass and each one contained a decal of a christening dress and some text of the bible printed onto the glass. This gave an interesting contrast between the delicacy of the dress and scripture, and the solidity of the cast glass itself.
She then produced another series very similar to this which is called “ The holy innocence/innocence lost” this was a reference to the child sexual abuse that was happening in the Catholic church in Ireland at the time, the subject of institutionalized child abuse and the scale of it is something that is often disregarded by mainstream media, so I am impressed that Alison has addressed and researched this subject and hopefully the message of her work will encourage other to do so too.
Alison created a series called “stitches in time” that was a commissioned by the culture company for the city of culture celebration of 2013. Here she created slumped square glass panels and arranged them to suggest a quilt. This glass piece commemorates the women that worked in the factory over the years, with each little square showing an image that relates to the shirt factory and the women working the machines and stitching. Each woman was allowed to take home a scrap of material at the end of the day, which they then turned into quilts for their families, this was the influence for the the design of “stitches in time”.
Alison has created some truly beautiful pate-de-verre vessels, whilst working with pate-de-verre Alison discovered that pate-de-verre held some similar properties that she liked in textiles, such as the delicacy of the material, and its texture and translucency along with the use of pattern that is frequently incorporated into pate-de-verre vessels. The pate de verre vessels in the image below were part of a collection called “vessels (of remembrance) and was part of a series called “born on a Monday" which is a poem that inspired the collection.
I feel as though for Alison, being a mother and the importance of motherhood is a continuous theme in her work, from the christening robe that has been passed down generation to generation, her kiln glass blocks that address the subject of child abuse and vulnerability of children, and the vessels inspired by ‘born on a Monday’ a poem which she has interpreted to be about a mother reflecting on the memories of her child and mourning the memories.