What do they do: Edmond Byrne makes everything from glass sculpture to bowls for your tabletop. Bernice Harrison reports
Last weekend on a very chilly Saturday morning, glass maker Edmond Byrne literally lay out his stall at the Cow's Lane open air market in Dublin's Temple Bar.
It's difficult to break through as a studio glass maker here, so the young designer takes every opportunity to show his gently curved, highly coloured glass - he's also driven around the country visiting craft shops hoping to find stockists. For crafts people, it's not enough to be expert at what they do, they also have to be able to sell.
"There's a small but growing glass art community here," says Edmond, who graduated from NCAD in 2000 and has set up his own studio in Drumcondra on Dublin's northside.
It's such a minority craft that when he came to build his hot glass workshop, he had to learn how to make the machinery and build the thing himself. "It's not like you can easily buy this stuff of the peg."
He now makes what he calls his wholesale range - mostly bowls and other vessels and quirky tabletop decorative items, such as vividly coloured glass flowers, that would look beautiful sitting on a window ledge catching the light. Streaks of pinks, red, and yellows flow through his bowls, showing his preference for warm colours.
"For my wholesale range, I'm interested in design-led functional ware," he says, a statement that would be music to the ears of the Crafts Council of Ireland, which has long been encouraging craft workers across all disciplines to be more design-led, and commercial in their approach.
All pieces appear to have "air bubbles" in them and these, he says, are becoming a sort of trademark for him; they are added during the process by the addition of a chemical while the glass is being made. "The bubbles catch the light," he says; "they make each piece glisten."
The other side of his work is his expanding commissioned portfolio. He contributed a major piece of garden sculpture to the highly successful Sculpture in Context exhibition at the National Botanic Gardens. It was a large-scale piece made up of 50 individual pieces of glass, lit by optic fibre and, as he says, "like a giant anemone growing out of a pond".
It was bought after the exhibition by a B & B owner in north Dublin to decorate a pond in the front garden. That exhibition resulted in other private commissions.
For next year he's working on bud-shaped glass sculptures that sit on top of cement pillars and on illuminated glass pieces designed to be placed on the lawn.
Deciding to explore outdoor glass sculpture could be a smart commercial move, given the amount of money people are willing to now pay on every aspect of their garden or outdoor space.
After NCAD, he went to Seattle to work with famous American glass artist Dale Chihuly. His timing meant that he was able to work on the massive glass chandelier made by Dale for the V & A in London. "So I played a tiny part in that," he says, "but the whole experience of working there was very inspiring."
His tabletop range (the piece above is part of it) is available in the Kilkenny Shop in Dublin as well as craft shops around the country; items cost from €20 to €116. Large commissions, such as the pond flower above, cost over €1,000.
Edmond Byrne, glass designer, tel 087 2325841
