Keith Cummings

Foreword by Charles R. Hajdamach

As a glass artist, educationalist and author Keith Cummings is a legend in his own lifetime. In 2008 Keith was honoured with the first major retrospective exhibition of his work in Britain at Bilston Craft Gallery in the West Midlands as part of the International Festival of Glass in Stourbridge. Entitled ‘Glass Routes; Wolverhampton to China’ the exhibition examined the impact and influence of Keith’s position as Professor of Glass Studies in the School of Art and Design at the University of Wolverhampton and his central role in the history of glass education in Great Britain. 

The exhibition also included a large representation of his work with glass and metal sculptures, and drawings and paintings placed into context alongside examples of works from staff, students and colleagues with whom he has engaged in an international dialogue about the history, techniques and the evolution of contemporary glass for over thirty years. In 2007 the publication of Keith’s seminal book ‘The Techniques of Kiln-formed Glass’ in a Chinese edition marked his impact on the next generation of glass artists practicing today in China, and the effect of the University of Wolverhampton glass programme upon newly established university programmes in studio glass in Shanghai and Beijing.

Keith’s staggering influence on successive generations of glassmakers dates back to the 1970s and the start of the studio glass movement in this country. In the wake of the 1976 Hot Glass Conference held in London, the end of the 1970s witnessed a period of technical discoveries which were to span the 1980s and resulted in glass losing its dependence on the blown vessel and becoming a sculptural medium. In 1980 Keith, who had been teaching at Stourbridge since 1967, published his work ‘The Technique of Glass Forming’ which quickly became the bible for the new breed of glass sculptors. The book ranks alongside Antonio Neri’s ‘The Art of Glass’ from 1611 in Florence, and Apsley Pellatt’s ‘Curiosities of Glassmaking’ from 1849 in London, as a landmark in the dissemination of glassmaking knowledge.

Having seen at first hand examples of cast glass from European and Swedish artists at the 1976 conference and heard Keith’s lectures at the Kiln Formed Glass Symposium in 1980, many artists took up the methods of casting glass as enthusiastically as others had taken up blowing a decade earlier. Keith had assiduously refused to be seduced by blown glass and advocated the use of glass-forming methods which looked back to Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Roman techniques. With his first hand study of ancient glasses to work out their methods of manufacture by a reverse logic, he also radically altered the views of notable archaeologists, who until then had held their own rather egocentric views of how ancient glass had been made.

Those ancient glass influences have been paramount in his work from the beginning but gradually other influences and other materials including metals have resulted in a body of work in which he has led the rest by example. No self-respecting glass collection, either private or public around the world, is without one of his masterpiece creations.

At the start of the 21st century he is universally acknowledged as one of the most original glass artists working on the international stage. If England operated the same system as America, of awarding ‘national treasure’ status to living artists, Keith would be the first British contemporary glass artist to be honoured with that much-deserved accolade.

Charles R. Hajdamach