Art of glass Latest Ione Thorkelsson retrospective a showcase of experiments with colour By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 5:22 PM CDT Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2023

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This article was published 22/08/2023 (1135 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For 50 years, Ione Thorkelsson has been working in glass, making her studio near Roseisle one of the longest continuously running glass studios in Canada.

And now, Manitobans will have the chance to own a piece of that history.

To commemorate Thorkelsson’s half-century as a trailblazer, innovator, glassblower and visual artist, the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq is hosting a series of retrospective releases featuring over 200 pieces of blown glass from Thorkelsson’s private archive, which will be on view and on sale at ShopWAG, the gallery shop, during each event.

The first two releases, which were held in the spring, sold out. The next release will be held Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m.

“A part of Ione’s story is told through these stunning blown glass works from her personal collection and archive,” says Sherri Van Went, retail operations manager at WAG-Qaumajuq. “They are amazing examples of Ione’s early explorations of colour and form — every piece is a remarkable and adventurous inquiry into the medium.”

For Thorkelsson, 76, these events have been a welcome celebration and a chance to reconnect with people she hasn’t seen in a long time.

“They’ve been more like parties than sales,” she says over coffee (she takes hers black) in the WAG-Qaumajuq cafe.

“Getting out all this stuff that’s been packed away was also really interesting. There’s pieces you think, ‘Oh, that looks OK to me,’ and others you think, ‘Eh, I don’t know.’”

The works featured in Thursday’s sale are from the 1970s and ‘80s when Thorkelsson began experimenting with the vivid colours she was able to get from a German supplier in 1976.

“I kind of went colour crazy,” she says with a laugh.

The sense of play is obvious; the vessels, bowls, perfume bottles and paperweights featured in the collection see her use of colour evolve, from saturated to intricately layered.

“A part of Ione’s story is told through these stunning blown glass works from her personal collection and archive.”–Sherri Van Went, WAG-Qaumajuq

It’s understandable why Thorkelsson felt, as she puts it, like “a kid colouring with glass crayons.” Prior to 1976, she was working with a more limited range of colours.

”It’s a really difficult chemical process to make a whole range of colors that fit your base glass,” she explains. “And I was doing all the chemistry myself.”

Working in her second studio in Graysville — 82 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg and 12 km east of her current studio in Roseisle — in the mid-1970s, she began the process of making her own glass from scratch, which she describes as “a bit of an occult process.”

She used everything from arsenic to brown sugar (which didn’t work, she notes) and, as soon as she hit on a recipe that worked, she began experimenting with making her own colours: cobalt for blue, manganese for purple-pink, copper oxide for browns and reds, and bone ash for white. (Pieces from this period were featured in the May release.)

The actual act of glassblowing is a full-body experience, she says.

“You have to move the whole time because the glass is hot and you have to sort of dance with the cooling and heating of the glass. It’s an amazing process to get into.

“And when you have a really good day, it just flows. The world is in the right place.”

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Thorkelsson “discovered” glass at the Czechoslovakia Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal.

“It’s amazing how many glass artists, present-day glass artists I run into, when you read their biographies, they mention the Czechoslovakia Pavilion at Expo 67,” she says with a laugh. “The Czechs were doing things with glass that were really amazing, these huge cast pieces. And they also had a display of historical glass where you walked into a room and it was just rows of this crystal, almost like an installation.”

Thorkelsson was an architecture student at the University of Manitoba at the time. A guest speaker who was working with glass came to speak to her class, and the seed was planted.

“It just opened up a different possibility to me,” she says.

She attended a summer course at Sheridan College in Ontario where she discovered glassblowing.

Thorkelsson’s journey from working with scraps of remelted window glass in her first studio (a repurposed chicken coop in Stony Mountain) to glassblowing to making cast-glass sculptures in her studio near Roseisle, where she’s been working for the past 30 years, has been long and slow, she says.

Casting glass — the process of melting glass into a mould so it can solidify into an object — also opened up new possibilities for her.

The first thing she cast? “Chicken feet,” she says. They were an interesting shape, and she could get them from her neighbour.

“I made the mould that was going to go in the kiln directly over the foot, and then burned out the foot, and then cast the glass into the cavity left behind,” she says.

She still remembers what it was like the first time a cast worked out. “It was pretty amazing,” she says with a smile.

In 1993, Glenn Allison, then the director of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon, had seen some of Thorkelsson’s early experiments with casting and invited her to do a solo show at the gallery.

Thorkelsson’s works, both blown and cast, have been featured in two solo shows and 10 group shows at the WAG between 1976 and 2021. Her 1998 solo show, Unwilling Bestiary — which featured the glass chicken feet in all their ghostly glory — was a paradigm shifter for both the artist, who began to regard her craft as art, and the gallery, which was doing the same.

“It was then I realized that Manitoba had been good for me, to me,” Thorkelsson says.

The line between craft and art felt softer, here.

“We did the show in ‘98 and then I went to the Canadian Glass Conference, and I realized there were other places where people weren’t welcomed into the public gallery the way I was being welcomed.”

Thorkelsson was awarded the 2010 Saidye Bronfman Award for Excellence in Fine Craft, one of eight Governor General’s Awards in visual arts. The following year, her installation Incoming — a flock of cast-glass bird wings — took flight when the Richardson International Airport’s new terminal opened.

While she’s been looking back at the last 50 years in preparation for the retrospective sales, Thorkelsson is looking forward, too.

“Too much, probably,” she says when asked if there’s anything she still wants to do.

“I find that I’m more content with being at home and working and I find taking it out into the world harder instead of easier,” she says. “But I’m working on an entirely new series of work and it’s working with actual light. I’ve been studying reflection and trying to bring light into the piece. So there’s lots to be done there.”

The next two releases of Thorkelsson’s archival work will be Sept. 28 from 5 to 8 p.m., and Oct. 26 from 5 to 8 p.m. September will feature pieces from the 1990s using metal-based colour, while October will feature opaque glass works from the late ’90s to 2006, when Thorkelsson traded in her blowpipe for casting.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com