The Vyne 

In 2012, Unravelled Arts commissioned me to produce a creative response to the historical setting of The Vyne, a National Trust house near Basingstoke. This Tudor era house displays paintings, sculptures and objects conveying the rich heritage of its owners.

I was instantly attracted to the Elizabethan neck ruffs worn by women. These fashion accessories were layered with copious yards of expensive linen or lace and embellished with gold and jewellery that signalled the wearer’s wealth, piety and political allegiances. Their dramatic form and construction, and the use of luminous materials, became the starting point for a sculptural interpretation in glass. Red was added to the colour scheme because aristocratic women paid for family stature with their own blood, whether by death or through producing heirs. Using a unique method of building up layers in fused and bent glass to create a dense mass of pattern, the work was placed on a table in the antechapel but was also hung at the Contemporary Applied Arts Gallery in 2014.