Since graduating in 1981, Neil Wilkin has used his skills to produce exquisite, luxury glass from his workshop. His specialist restoration skills earned him coveted commissions including the ‘blanks’ for the Royal Windsor Castle fire damaged chandeliers and speciality working with international artists to make their own artworks.
Is his own words:
‘As a child I wanted to be a geologist. My father introduced me to materials and science by bringing home as many different elements as he could and I remember shiny metals, black carbon and vivid yellow sulphur.
The geology beneath our feet shapes and colours our environment in every way. From the rusty iron of the red Australian outback, to the sunshine on the ground which drives our weather, not least the rain in the verdant Welsh hills where the folded rocks turn everything upside down, and we have a pool at the top of the hill. It was colour and heat that first pulled me towards the furnace at college. I had gone to work with my hands as a potter, and left obsessed with fire and glass making.
When I blow glass the colours in glass behave like layers of rock. Hard and soft, absorbing and transmitting heat just as they do light. The challenge in my new work is to encourage the form to flow, yet at the same time to allow those layers to pull and draw, a combination of refinement control and freedom’