Exquisite and deranged: two glass exhibitions reviewed

A ‘Ghost Shop’ has appeared between Domino’s Pizza and Shoe Zone on Sunderland High Street. Look through the laminated window glass and you’ll see more glass: glass shop fittings, a glass cheese plant, a glass pedal bin spilling disposable glass cups, glass chocolate wrappers and glass betting slips littering the floor. Ryan Gander likes the fact that there’s no explanation of his see-through betting shop: ‘If you tell everyone it’s a contemporary art project, they’d run away.’

Gander is one of four artists commissioned by Sunderland’s National Glass Centre to make works inspired by the history of the north-east. Two artists, Katie Paterson and Monster Chetwynd, have chosen themes relating to St Bede, marking the thousandth anniversary of the relocation of his relics from Jarrow to Durham. Paterson’s ‘The Moment’, a 15-minute hourglass filled with cosmic sand, has been installed in a niche in the south aisle of Durham Cathedral inviting reflection on Bede’s creation of the western calendar, and Chetwynd’s gaily coloured glass dioramas illustrating episodes from the lives of Bede and Cuthbert are on display in the cathedral’s Galilee Chapel next to Bede’s tomb. Pascal Marthine Tayou’s ‘Colonial Ghost’, an installation of glass crucifixes configured from recreations of African colonial statues, runs the length of the Balcony Gallery at the National Glass Centre.

Glass raises ghosts in Sunderland. St Peter’s Church, just up the road from the centre, boasted the first stained-glass windows in England, installed by Gaulish glassmakers brought over by St Benedict Biscop, abbot of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Priory, in 674 AD. ‘They came,’ says Bede, ‘and they not only finished the work required, but from this caused the English to know and learn their handicraft.’ Shipping links and easy access to sand and coal made Sunderland a centre of glassmaking: in the mid-19th century 20 companies provided work for more than 1,000 craftsmen.