After taking early retirement from her career in 2010, Sandra studied Art & Design (major Glass) at the Glyndwr University School of Art & Design, where she successfully completed a Bachelor of Arts in the summer of 2016.

Her degree show was exhibited at New Designers in Islington, London in 2016 and was then included as part of a group of selected makers touring the North of England during 2017.

As her work progressed, Sandra set up a studio at her home in Cumbria where she now designs and creates large kiln formed cast sculptures, inspired primarily by the landscape around her

Casting glass is a multi-stage process which results in unique pieces of glass.

• The first stage is to sketch and then sculpt in clay what will be the final sculpture in glass.

• A two layered mould is then made by hand reinforced with fiberglass to add strength during the firing process. Dependent on the size and thickness of the sculpture the kiln firing can take anything from 4 days to several weeks.

• The final stage is to hand finish the sculpture through cold working with water fed hand power tools. Each sculpture can take up to a week to hand finish.

No two pieces of cast glass are the same - each piece is completely unique.

Continually looking at new techniques and furthering her research and experimentation she has undertaken master classes with highly respected glass artists such as Petr Stacho (Czech Republic), Vladimir Klein (Czech Republic) and Dr. Gerry King (Australia).

Sandra’s work is in collections in the UK, USA and Saudi Arabia.

Work represented by NLG:

Glass: Sandra Balmer

https://www.sandrabalmerglass.co.uk