Gallery
In the absence of the many fairs and exhibitions Amanda normally takes part in, you can buy her work at her Etsy shop (see details on this page) or by contacting her direct.
Amanda is a member of the Gallery at the Guild in Chipping Campden where she exhibits all year round. The Gallery will be open when government restrictions allow - however the Gallery also has an online shop which is always open.
In 'normal' years she is a well known and popular exhibitor at over 20 of the UK's best Art Festivals, Open Studios, Artist and Maker Fairs and more.
Including mac Birmingham, WOMAD, Broadway Art Festival, Art in the Park Leamington, Blackthorpe Barn Bury St Edmunds, Wirksworth, Saltaire and Melbourne Art Trails as well as being an organiser for the Coventry Art Trail (part of Warwickshire Open Studios) and the popular Secret Studio Sale, Warwickshire Open Studios 'artists jumble sale' event early each year.
In 2020 she continued to work online with a major collaboration with local charity Pass the Smile childhood cancer fund, raising over £2000 with her specially designed glass sunflower plant decorations.
She also took part in the Game of Shrooms, a world wide treasure hunt for Artist-made Mushrooms and toadstools in August. With locations in Coventry and Llandudno - all her mushrooms were found, thanks to very easy clues!
Her work is particularly well-suited to Instagram, being very small, and most of her online activity during Lockdowns has been there.
She has continued to create and sell work including a hugely successful tiny glass version of the Coronavirus.
Plans for 2021 start with co-organising The Secret Studio Sale -Online for Warwickshire Open Studios on 27 February, more charity fundraising collaborations, definitely another treasure hunt and hopefully a few actual Live events where she can set up stall.
Amanda is has been a Maker of Tiny Glass Stuff since 1996.
Her mission is to reclaim the tradition of making ‘little glass animals’ to reinvent them for the present day as quirky, affordable collectables for the smallest spaces and gardens.
Tiny retro rockets and aliens bump shoulders with cacti, puffins and ice lollies, with a few toadstools, glass slippers and ghosts thrown in for good measure. Her Great Glass Advent Calendar has become an annual institution on Instagram!
She first learned to make glass beads alongside Makers who went on to become some of the UK's most well known lamp work glass artists, and between them they founded Glass Bead Makers UK.
Amanda has gone on to regularly exhibit at some of the UK's most prestigious Craft Fairs including several years as a demonstrating at the late lamented Art in Action in Oxfordshire.
Glass beads are still part of her repertoire but today she tends to concentrate on making 'tiny glass stuff' for house and home.
The Lamp Work method she uses is worth a bit of explaining. It involves heating and melting coloured glass rods in a flame and manipulating the 'drips' with small tools. Fine metal sticks (mandrels) can be used to form the hole in beads or buttons. Working freehand a little patience is needed to make tiny birds, ice skates, pumpkins and more. Each object takes approximately 5 minutes to 1 hour to make and hot glass of different colours can be added gradually and precisely. Once a design is finished, it goes (still hot) into a kiln to anneal (slowed cooling) for up to 6 hours. When cool, the pieces can be cleaned, sorted and assembled into finished designs. It is a painstaking process and not for the faint hearted.
It's a method that is very different from both fused glass and blowing glass but also has its similarities. The main difference is that fused glass makers and glass blowers think lamp workers are bit mad for working so small!
Amanda works mainly to commission and on short runs of designs for exhibitions and art fairs. She loves meeting people and introducing them to lamp work and has done this at Designer Maker events (and Open Studios) the length and breadth of the UK from Brighton to Edinburgh, Suffolk to Cornwall, Derbyshire to London.
She is closely connected with Warwickshire Open Studios, having been until 2017 part of the Organising Team and came up with the idea of the Autumn Art Fair and the Secret Studio Sale (which she continues to organise each January with fellow artist Claire Seneviratne). She also co-ordinates The Coventry Arts Trail, a group of artists centred on Chapelfields and Earlsdon (but city wide) who take part in Open Studios each year.