Process & Creation | An insight into the artwork by Sarah Wiberley
15th January 2025


Process & Creation | An insight into the artwork by Sarah Wiberley for her solo exhibition 'It's Complicated' | 20/01/25- 14/02/25
To describe Sarah Wiberley’s work as complicated, is quite the understatement, for her glassmaking revolves around her love of colour combined with her astonishingly intricate interwoven geometric designs.
Whilst acknowledging the traditions of glass making within her range of techniques, they are also evident within her unique style. Serving as a starting point, Wiberley adapts these traditional methods to suit her expressive aesthetic, encasing her fluid forms with her distinctive imagery and decoration.
With her collections, ‘Going Round in Circles’, ‘Life Patterns’ and ‘It’s Complicated’, Wiberley excels at the complex. Distinct and commanding layered patterns with multiple hues traverse around her vessels. What would be complicated to achieve in the 2D, effortlessly encases her three-dimensional curving canvasses, applied with a couturier’s eye for colour.
Masterful and meticulous, these motifs could be planned electronically but with a cold aspect of too much accuracy, this wouldn’t respond and align to handblown glass and its nuanced & subtly undulating surface.
To backtrack a little, these detailed compositions would not be possible without the multiple layers of glass, in varying shades and differing opacities, being exploited by the artist to create her surfaces, techniques that have become instantly recognisable as signature processes within her work.
Therefore, every unique piece requires careful planning with each design first drawn on paper by hand, then carefully transposed to the surface of the glass. The precise final patterns shown are then brought to life by masking and sandblasting different areas, with each configuration revealing a different section and colour combination.
Wiberley's methods may seem time-consuming, but with no equal path to follow, the final results are simply hypnotic.
It's Complicated A solo exhibition
Further works By the artist
Sarah Wiberley Image © Agata Pec

Pre-blown colour cups & rods to be reheated for blowing Image courtesy of the artist

The artist in action Image courtesy of the artist
Blown blanks Image courtesy of the artist

Patterns worked out on paper Images courtesy of the artist


Transposing, mapping, planning and visualising Images courtesy of the artist



Sandblasting & revealing the layers Images courtesy of the artist


Cold-working the base Image © David Cleveland

Finished artworks Image courtesy of the artist
