Ed & Margaret Burke - E+M Glass
by Angie Boyer
Working with molten glass is a hot and heavy task, yet Ed and Margaret Burke and their three co-workers seem to make light work of it, rhythmically and systematically working as a team to produce classical shapes and wonderfully original coloured glassware. “No one who has witnessed hot, molten glass being blown to shape could fail to be fascinated and enthralled by the process,” says Ed in the Preface to his book ‘Glass Blowing, A Technical Manual’, which is published by the Crowood Press. He continues, “A chance meeting with molten glass at college in my home town of Sunderland was to change my life. While on my way to a lecture, I walked past an open door and was astonished by the noise and excitement within. I was transfixed, I stared in amazement through the doorway. The rumble of the huge gas burners, the white glow of the furnace, the perspiration on the brow of the makers, smoke and ash billowing up to the ceiling as they breathed life into the glass. From the most basic of raw materials - sand - an endless array of objects was being made, limited only by the imagination of the craftsmen at work. The juxtaposition of colour, clarity, transparency, opalescence, iridescence, reflectiveness and refractiveness was just stunning. The glassmakers were exploiting these sympathetic but contrasting qualities with their stunningly dextrous skills. This was one of my life’s defining moments. The glass making wizards were weaving their spells, pulling me towards them. As I walked through the door, my life began to change, every step of the process was shrouded in wonderment and I longed to have their secrets revealed to me.” Now, having worked as a professional glass maker for many years and establishing himself as one of the finest in his field, Ed’s enthusiasm and passion for glass continues to inspire his work, it has become his life - and that of his wife, Margaret, as well. The couple first met at college in Stoke, when they were students on the same glass course and their paths through training and then setting up and running their own glass studio have run together ever since. “When we left Staffordshire college in the early ‘80s, we both applied for the same job,” said Margaret. “Actually, Ed got the job, even though I was a better glass blower at the time! Being employed then was really more like having an apprenticeship with just a minimal salary. Ed worked for about twelve months making wine goblets, earning barely £40 a week, so I took a job to bring in a regular income for us. Then he moved south, to the Glasshouse Studio in London, still earning about £40 a week, but his flat there was costing him £43 a week, which wasn’t exactly ideal!” Even though the finances didn’t add up, the one advantage of working at the Glasshouse was that both Ed and Margaret, now married, were able to use the equipment at weekends for their own work, something that helped them move closer to their goal of opening their own studio.
“We had decided in college that we wanted to open our own glass studio,” explained Ed. “We were visiting Cowdy Glass, seeing the work of Pauline Solven being made by Neil Wilkin and Roger Tye, when my tutor, David Reekie, said to me ‘You’ll have all of this before long’. That sowed the seed and bit by bit our plan started to come together.” Before their plan came to fruition, Ed took employment in London with contemporary glass artist, Anthony Stern. “Anthony Stern wanted a glassblower to work with him,” said Margaret. “I applied originally, but Ed was actually better suited to the work than me and he ended up with the job. In terms of paid work, this was really a step in the wrong direction, as there was no proper salary at all, but we were given a flat to live in, which was great. we had a roof over our heads. It just meant that we had to make our own glass in our spare time to earn a living and Anthony Stern was very positive and supportive in helping us do that.” Their spare time occurred spasmodically it seems, as they describe Anthony Stern as being “the archetypal artist, who would make an instant decision to work on late night sessions of spontaneous creativity.” Those many hours of working in such an impulsive and inspirational way taught Ed much and prepared him for the time when he was headhunted to work at the Glassworks London Ltd, where he at long last earned a proper wage as one of the highest paid craftsmen there. Even better, Ed’s new position meant that they could afford for Margaret to give up her regular job and she joined him at Glassworks, working on engraving in the cold glass department. So what took them away from London, back towards the north? “When we had Charlie, our first son, it prompted the question about whether we wanted him to grow up in London and we decided that our family’s future was in the countryside rather than the city,” they explained. The remote country home that they found for themselves then is the place that they still live and work in, absolutely ideal for their purposes, a property full of history and character which seems as though it was destined to be theirs. Once an old bakery with a shop front, baker’s ovens, stables and delivery horses, now it is not only home to Ed and Margaret and their three boys, Charlie, Tim and Joshua, but also a busy working glass studio and retail shop for their work.
“It was a strange experience, buying this property,” Ed recalled. “We were actually interviewed to determine whether or not we were suitable to take it over, people here didn’t want it to be sold to developers and everyone was over the moon when we bought it to use as a glass studio, it meant that we would be helping to hold this small village community together.”
Their years at Sarn Glass Studio, as the place became known, have taken Ed and Margaret on quite a journey with their business, a journey that has had its inevitable highs and lows. At one time, with a team of twelve people, they were making big orders for even bigger companies in the UK and USA. “In the late 80s we wanted to get our work into the major stores,” they recalled. “After speaking to buyers from Conrans in the UK and Barneys in New York, we soon realised that it wasn’t their policy to buy direct; they both recommended that we exhibited at Top Drawer. We found that we had to do the show three or four times, though, before either store would place an order, they wanted to see our designs develop and needed to be confident that were in business to stay - then they both placed orders at the same show! It was frustrating at the time, but easy to appreciate their point of view in hindsight.”
Naturally, once their work appeared in those major stores, others approached them and they realised that being stocked by such prominent outlets, actually gave their work an important and enviable seal of approval. As Conran opened more stores worldwide - Japan, Hamburg and beyond - and Barneys followed suit, opening a new outlet just off Central Park with a section dedicated to functional British Crafts and then more in Chicago and Beverley Hills, Ed and Margaret found themselves swamped with orders. “It was an impossible situation, even with the big team we had then we simply couldn’t manage to fulfill the orders - I just worried and asked myself how on earth we could do it all,” recalled Ed. Other glassmakers - individual makers and larger, well known companies - were asked to help out, but they, too, were unable to meet the delivery dates. Ed and Margaret did eventually manage the situation, with the help of an outside glass company, but this sudden expansion of their business threw out some clear warning signals for them “It was becoming so huge so quickly, it was frightening for us, it just became too scary, too big, too busy for us to handle. We decided to become a limited company, but even so it was terrifying, to be honest,” said Ed. “I hardly slept for a year or more, I was so worried about the business - big orders, lots of staff, wages to pay, huge responsibilities - even with a team of twelve working round the clock shifts and weekends, we still struggled to fulfill the orders on time. In the end, we made the decision to put our prices up and managed to ‘push it away’ a bit, put it into some kind of perspective that we could work with.” Now, with a team of three - Sue, Sara and Jenny - working with them, and Charlie helping out when he’s not at College, Ed and Margaret have a happy and manageable business which now feels more like a family at work than a frantic juggling act of international orders. They have learnt a great deal from the experiences of those hectic times and happily allow themselves space to develop new designs and, once again, create pieces for their own pleasure. “The American clients wanted exclusivity on designs, so we annually presented them with something new - but one year our designs were too new, too different and they didn’t like what they saw. We learnt that we needed to manage change sensitively and gradually - by retaining the existing shapes but introducing just a few new colours, rather than offering a totally new design, we found what they were looking for. We tried to bring in too much change too quickly and realised that new designs need to evolve gently for people to be comfortable with them.” Not so long ago, Ed discovered that America had a bit of a treat in store for him. “Nicky Williams, of Kinky glass, was working at weekends at our studio while she was still at college in Wolverhampton. Nicky told me they had organised a trip to Dale Chihuly’s studio in Seattle and also to see William Morris working at Pilchuck Glass Studio. I said to her that if anybody dropped out she should let me know because I would take their place at the drop of a hat!! The following Monday one of the students did drop out and my place was secured by mid afternoon the same day. The reputation of the glass department at Wolverhampton opened doors that I could never have got through and also allowed me to talk to these amazing people and their assistants. These big name artists were giving up huge amounts of time for no personal gain, they were just nice guys. Dale Chihuly’s workshop manager took us round to various small studios in Seattle, to the best restaurants but at student budgets, to the Spectrum glass factory. Chihuly’s studio employs over 300 people, so this guy was a busy man. One evening Jim Mongrain met a few of us in a bar. Jim makes most of Chihuly’s larger pieces as well as making his own Venetian style goblets. He explained to the students that without Chihuly there would be no studio glass movement in the USA or the UK and as such the man deserved nothing but respect. All the people we met said the same of him, the mutual respect is my greatest and strongest memory of that trip.”
Occasionally Ed will also work on a larger scale - not quite as huge as Chihuly’s constructions, but large challenging pieces none the less. I asked him about some large scale, coloured sculptures displayed in their shop. “Those big flowers were made by Charlie and myself one Saturday afternoon and evening. He had been pestering me to do something “a bit mad” - like make a glass tree - and the flowers are what we ended up with. We showed them in Frankfurt and they were featured in an up market Dutch flower arranging magazine. The process of making them is fairly similar to blowing smaller pieces, but a lot slower and you also need a highly skilled assistant who can read your mind and anticipate your needs before you know them yourself, which is why Charlie helped me!” When we visited Ed and Margaret they were working on smaller designs, their popular range of coloured goblets. As a subtle reminder of the schedules of family life, Tim came home from school just as we were watching Ed, Margaret and Sara settle into their respective roles, working with the hot glass. Using centuries old techniques, Ed took a gather of molten glass on the end of a hollow metal blowpipe and gently rolled it in coloured silica, carefully covering the surface with the fine grains, which would bring colour to the finished piece. Blowing steadily through the opposite end of the pipe, he carefully created the body of the goblet, teasing it into shape with a wad of wet newspaper in one hand, and then standing up to swing the piece to and fro, pendulum-like, on the end of the pipe to ease it into a longer shape. Using a punty iron, a solid metal rod, Sara delicately transferred a smaller second gather of molten glass from the furnace onto the end of the blown glass, the beginning stage of making the stem and base of the goblet. On the opposite side of the studio, Margaret took over the completion of the piece, placing it into the heat of the glory hole, cutting and shaping to perfection with jacks and measures. This masterpiece of teamwork was carefully removed from the punty iron and put into the annealer to gradually cool before being transferred to the cold glass studio for patterns to be drawn and etched onto the outer surface, the finishing stages to be completed. The whole studio, including the furnace, has been designed and created by Ed with their own particular work practices in mind. Between them, E & M Glass have made tens of thousands of goblets like this over the years, all unique yet somehow alike. “What we make today will all match as a set, and yesterday’s and tomorrow’s goblets will all match each other as well, but take some from today’s batch and put them with some made a week ago and they won’t be alike. It’s strange, each set is different from another, but somehow the individual goblets in the set all go together,” said Ed. “Make the same thing from a mould and it simply doesn’t work - people recognise that. I remember offering to help a lady select twelve similar goblets for herself, when she objected and said ‘young man, if I’m paying this much money, I don’t want them all to be the same, that’s the whole point, I want them to match, but to be individual as well.’ I guess it’s the little differences in the handmade that make each one perfect!” It’s these little differences that appeal to the buyers with an eye for individuality and quality, bringing them orders for handcrafted corporate glassware from prestigious clients such as the international Four Seasons Hotels, firstly for their Hawaii hotel and later for others in the group. E & M Glass is bought and collected worldwide and they are regularly commissioned to make awards and commemorative pieces, such as a glass plinth for the London office of AON to commemorate the 200 employees who were killed in the Twin Towers tragedy five years ago. With such a global client base, I wondered how Ed and Margaret address the inevitable issue of having their work copied and mass produced. Like many professional makers, they have concluded that there is little to be gained by fighting over copyright, their advantage is in the quality of their work and originality of their designs. “If a cheap copy is produced, which has happened in the past, it can actually give people something to compare our work with and clearly highlights the differences in quality and finish. If handled properly, copies can work in favour of the original - there are plenty of look-alike Rolex watches selling at cheap prices, but that doesn’t stop the real thing from selling, it probably enhances the value. We have our ‘signature’ on our work and each piece is accompanied by a signed certificate of authenticity, so we like to think that we take a positive approach to this rather than putting negative energy into fighting an impossible battle of always trying to block copies in different parts of the world. It can even give us the nudge we need sometimes to move forward with our work.”
Looking back, Ed and Margaret both think that it’s perhaps because they concentrated for so many years on supplying overseas customers that, at one time, their UK market had a tendency to be rather under supplied. Now they are focusing on their home market and by exhibiting at Select British in Exeter earlier this year, they made contact with some UK galleries they’ve not supplied before. “My original aim was always to make affordable glass, something my Mum could afford to buy,” explained Margaret, “I wanted to make glass that was within the reach of most people and I have been lucky to have been able to fulfill that aim. Now I find myself being able to make the things I particularly want to make as these new galleries have commissioned one-off pieces featuring on my ‘pictorial art’, which is inspired by my lifelong interest in naive or primitive art.” Margaret’s style is very individual, she takes a child’s drawing (sometimes one of her own family’s) or perhaps an ancient symbol and transfers her interpretation of it onto the glass, producing a piece which has its own individuality and personality, yet something that is instantly recognisable as being her work. “Some of my recent work has been selected for the Affordable Art Show and also the Liverpool Museums - oh, and I recently won a prize in the Sculpture Category at Bonhams,” she added, rather unassumingly for someone who regularly makes one-off pieces for individual collectors and world renowned institutions.
Ed has a natural talent for demonstrating his work and at shows he tells a fascinating tale of the history of glass as he makes pieces to illustrate his story. “I believe that we have a responsibility to keep these skills alive, it’s one reason why I produced my book, to share my knowledge and help others learn, showing them that’s it’s not just about understanding a technique, it’s what you do with it, how you master it that makes the difference. The work we do now is hugely important, after all, in years to come, when people look back at this age, they’re not going to look at Ikea are they? History books are all full of who won which war - plus art history and culture. The craftsmen of today are creating that cultural history.” Margaret enjoys making history in her own way, proud of the fact that the three people employed by her and Ed are all women. It’s not an easy business for women to be accepted in to or succeed in, but these three seem to have found their niche, each having worked for E&M Glass for many years and proficient in all the hot and cold glass working skills. Some of their work is displayed in the shop alongside that of Ed and Margaret and, just as Anthony Stern offered the couple use of his studio when they began their careers, they too now offer their workforce the use of the studio facilities during lunch breaks. It’s easy to see how this family affair works so very well with everything they do. Some pieces are obviously Ed’s, other more definitely Margaret’s, whilst in much of what you see there is a pleasing combination of both their skills and talents. “If Margaret knows what she wants to achieve, I can blow the piece she needs to work on,” explained Ed. His fine, precise blowing provides her with an excellent blank canvas with colours expertly blended on which to create her deep etched designs. She is fascinated by texture, the results are tactile and pleasing, patterns that you can “see with your fingers”, pieces with warmth, weight and substance that are an experience to touch and hold. Their life changing assessment of their business, when they made the decision to downsize and take the rush and panic out of their lives, was followed by another life changing event, the birth of their third son, Joshua, who has Downs Syndrome. Definitely part of the team (some will have seen him helping his Dad demonstrate to the crowds at Art in Action this year), Joshua needs more time and attention than many children of his age, especially as he has just started school in the village. Sue, Sara and Jenny all help the family to keep an eye on Josh (Ed tells us that he’s keen to wander off and explore the countryside, given half a chance!) and he has probably been the inspiration for his elder brother, Charlie, to choose Art Therapy to study when he goes to University. But more than anything, Joshua has perhaps unwittingly been instrumental in putting the perspective back into Ed and Margaret’s working life and time management. “I’m just so lucky to be able to do what I love doing best,” said Margaret. “I think we’re quite privileged to be able to do what we want to do, it’s an honour to be able to do something I enjoy and that people are prepared to pay money for.” They both have work in important national and international craft collections and museums, although Ed said, “We’re usually the last to find out about it! I still come back to the fact that we do this because we want to. Most folks have a job of work that earns them money to be able to have a hobby. Even if we had loads of money, we’d still be doing this - glassblowing, making glass that makes you smile.” To buy direct or to discuss special commissions, please contact:
Ed and Margaret Burke
E & M Glass
Sarn Glass Studio
Tallarn Green
Malpas
SY14 7LN
T: 01948 770464
E: info@emglass.co.uk
www.handmadeglass.net
www.emglass.co.uk
www.edburkeglass.com
