Stuart Garfoot

Foreword by Charles R. Hajdamach

Stuart Garfoot has successfully combined his talents as a glass artist and a designer for industry, a tightrope which is often difficult to negotiate but in Stuart’s case has led him and his work to groundbreaking achievements.

In recent years Stuart has become famous for his development of the centrifuge technique of shaping glass and making it available to the individual artist. By its very nature the centrifuge technique requires heavy investment in machinery and has been the province of the large glass companies who have used it to produce large runs of items.

The process involves dropping a gather of molten glass into an iron mould which is then spun at high speeds to force the glass up the mould. By carving the mould with various patterns or introducing raised three-dimensional elements the glass can be controlled to form intricate and beautiful textures.

First invented by the Swedish glass firm of Orrefors in the 1950s it has remained an industrial process until Stuart’s intervention and development of it as part of his educational responsibilities at the University of Wolverhampton.

Stuart’s other achievements are no less impressive. He has been involved in major initiatives at Wolverhampton University including a redesign of the glass and ceramic facilities as well as acting as advisor to Waterford Crystal and to the Chinese glass industries and manufacturers on design and technical processes. Despite this heavy workload his commitment to his own work has resulted in his involvement at various international symposia and the inclusion of his work in many joint exhibitions.

In 2005 he was honoured with a prestigious solo exhibition in Paris which he called ‘Poseidon’s Paradise’. The theme of the exhibition centred on his fascination with the beauty and preservation of coral reefs. The stunning array of individual forms with their combination of blown, applied and centrifuge elements were still underpinned by Stuart’s use of industrial production systems, in that case by using a single master mould to take extra separate casts, working those casts into one-off designs and blowing and casting from that unique shape.

For sixteen years Stuart was employed as Designer/Artist for the great German firm of Rosenthal AG, one of the few British artists on their books alongside Eduardo Paolozzi and David Queensberry, and created a number of stunning ranges for the lifestyle company. In choosing designer artists the company philosophy, first established by Philip Rosenthal, is that they “have all dedicated themselves to designing contemporary originals of our times”. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the cool and sophisticated work of Stuart Garfoot.

Charles R. Hajdamach