Sarah Urwin Jones

TUCKED neatly into the east coast of Caithness south of Wick is the tiny fishing village of Lybster, built around its capacious harbour in the early 1800s by local landowners, the Sinclairs. The fishing may have declined in recent years, but in other ways Lybster is thriving, not least through the reputation of its most recent industry, glass-making.

Perhaps industry is too strong a word, for the remit of North Lands Creative Glass is to foster artistry, innovation and creativity, alongside training that ranges from beginners classes to masterclasses. There is precedent for glass, here, if not in Lybster proper. Wick was the founding home of Caithness Glass in the 1960s. The paperweight specialist shut down in 1995, taking its head of operations out of Caithness for good, the year before North Lands opened. The two are not unconnected.

The initial North Lands operation was small, the idea to found “a glass study centre and residency programme…to link the rich landscape and culture of Caithness with the imagination and skill of international artists and designers interested in glass.” Over the past 20 years, now celebrated at Dovecot in Edinburgh in this fascinating and very diverse exhibition curated by Amanda Game, that remit has remained the same, but the scope has expanded along with the workshops themselves and artists travel from around the world to study at North Lands.

The exhibition is divided into two – a history of the centre with video installation of former directors and artists talking about their experiences alongside works from the North Lands collection, and a series of 10 artists’ installations.

The collection is indicative of the diversity that can be found in modern glass making, from stunning goblets to idiosyncratic sculptural constructions and portraits. The work from the featured artists, too, pushes the boundaries of the genre. At the far end of the gallery, Magdalene Odundo’s blown glass installation, suspended from the ceiling, is like a series of large hanging chrysalises, sinuous, curved, their lightness in form defying their glass weight.

Tobias Mohl uses “Venetian techniques in a Scandinavian way” which in short equates to a stunning installation of smooth spear-head-shaped glass criss-crossed with veins of colour, like appropriated seedheads, finely sketched. At the opposite end of the finishing spectrum, Petr Stanicky pours molten glass between glass panes to create a flowing freeform structure that is nonetheless contained within the glass panes that guide its oozing path.

If Stanicky plays with the molten facet of glass, Colin Reid plays with its ability to take in and transform light. Reid’s Colour Saturation Column (2012) is a tall column of sandwiched cast glass, slotted through with shots of colour like the strands in a marble, but densely, prismatically formed. Udo Zembok’s coloured glass sheets work in a similar manner, if in different form, the light changing depending on the angle at which these new works, created especially for the exhibition, are viewed.

There are artists here whose specialism is primarily in another material, such as Richard Slee – in his case, clay – who come to glass as their practice dictates. Nearby, North Lands creative director Emma Woffenden (the post lasts three years) exhibits curious constructed glass figures. David Reekie presents figurative work too, his stubby cast glass sculptures questioning the viewer.

And finally, on a wall, Maria Bang Esperen’s glass experiments are played out in video, from glass strands carefully gathered into a large smooth stone-shaped form, then blow-torched into molten destruction, to glass blown by pressured air into a sudden giant arcing glass worm that then shatters under the pressure.

It’s the sheer imaginative use of form that impresses here and sticks in the mind, alongside the brilliance of the existence of a place where artists can play with and concentrate on their medium, in inspirational surroundings. For many of the artists it is the inspiration of this unique place to work that stays with them, alongside the intensive period working on their practice alongside other diverse artists. Living, briefly, amidst a landscape that seems in its curious geology to have a direct link to some of the essence and layered constructions of the glass artist’s materials and technique, Petr Stanicky is not alone when he remembers his time at Northlands as, “rich moist foggy days with a unique feeling of light; deserted places still standing; naked stone structures that are the essence of our coexistence with this raw, but beautiful, place.” Here’s to the next 20 years.

North Lands Creative Glass: A Portrait at 20

Dovecot Gallery, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh

0131 550 3660, www.dovecotstudios.com, until 29 Oct