Glass art personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

My aunt repairs leaded windows for local churches and houses, and for the last three years I have spent most Saturdays in her workshop holding panels steady, sorting offcuts and learning to cut a reliable straight score. What keeps me there is how little glass behaves like other materials. It is rigid until it is not; it rewards a confident hand and punishes hesitation; and the same sheet reads completely differently depending on whether light is behind it or on it. I want to study glass art because I would like to work with it as a material in its own right rather than only as a repair medium, and because I am far more interested in making than in describing making. Reading has widened what I think glass can do. Cindy Ann Coldiron's short history of pressed glass showed me how much industrial process shapes what we consider a design, and looking at Dale Chihuly's work made me realise that scale and grouping can matter as much as the individual form. I have also spent time with photographs of medieval grisaille windows, where the pattern is carried by line and tone rather than strong colour, which is closer to what I find myself drawn to. A degree would give me access to hot glass, kiln processes and cold working alongside sustained criticism of my own ideas, which is what I cannot get from a domestic workshop and a library card.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels in Art and Design, Chemistry and History each feed this application in different ways. In Art I have built a body of work around light and transparency, including a sequence of drawings of water in jam jars that forced me to look properly at refraction rather than drawing what I assumed was there. My final project is a set of small panels exploring how overlapping layers of tissue and acetate can imitate flashed glass, which has taught me to plan for the finished piece rather than the maquette. Chemistry has been unexpectedly useful. Studying metal ions in solution and the colours they produce made sense of why my aunt's supplier lists cobalt, copper and selenium as colourants, and work on amorphous solids and cooling rates helped me understand why annealing matters and why a piece can survive the kiln and then fail overnight. I am careful not to overstate this: I understand the principles at school level, not the practice of a batch furnace. History has trained me to build an argument from evidence, which I have used in essays on nineteenth century industry and on the Gothic Revival. I also chose to write my extended piece of coursework on changes in church restoration during the Victorian period, which gave me a clearer sense of why so many of the windows my aunt works on are replacements rather than originals.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Alongside college I work Saturday mornings in a garden centre, mostly on tills and plant care. It is ordinary work, but it has made me quicker at talking to people I do not know and better at keeping calm when four customers want attention at once, which matters in any shared studio. In my aunt's workshop I have learned specific, limited skills: cutting to a template, grozing an edge, cementing and cleaning a panel, and keeping a tidy bench so that glass dust and lead do not travel. She checks all the soldering and I do not claim to be a glazier, but I have made two small panels of my own, one of which hangs in her kitchen and shows every mistake I made on the first. I volunteer twice a month at a craft afternoon run at a community centre, helping older residents with card making and mosaic work. Explaining a technique to someone with limited grip strength has taught me to break tasks down and to adapt rather than insist, and I enjoy the conversation as much as the making. My longest-running habit is collecting glass from the river near my grandparents' house, which I wash, sort by colour and record in a notebook with the date and the place found. Several of those fragments have become the starting point for colour studies in my portfolio, and the habit of looking closely at worn, imperfect surfaces is something I would want to carry into a degree.

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