Oriel Hicks lifts the lid of her dog-eared cardboard box with as much excitement as the rest of us might display when opening a box of posh artisan chocolates. Her eyes light up as she reveals its contents: scores of slightly irregular squares of coloured glass, tightly packed like After Eights.
“These are mouth-blown in Germany, just look at the lines and bubbles in them,” she exclaims, holding a rose-coloured one to the light. “They’re so gorgeous, they make me salivate. You almost want to eat them! I’ve always been obsessed with glass and light. And of course, here on Scilly we have the most fabulous ever-changing light, with a clarity that’s mind-blowing.”
Her favourite coloured glass? “Pink glass is gorgeous, and is the most expensive as it has gold in it,” she says, handing me a square that resembles a square slither of Turkish delight. “Reds and yellows are made with selenium, which makes them a bit opaque. But the blues, greens and turquoises are my favourites, inspired by the glass-clear aquamarine seas around me. They’re the colours I use most in my work.”
She shows me a commission she’s currently working on, a circular stained-glass window in blues and greens featuring two white doves for a private house in Cornwall. “The joy of stained glass is not just the glass itself but the coloured reflection it casts around it,” says Oriel. “That’s a thing of incredible beauty, as more and more people are now realising.”
The place where Oriel’s glass magic happens is an industrial estate opposite Porthmellon beach on St. Mary’s. “The workshop is called Phoenix Craft Studios as it rose out of the ashes, as it were, of a glass-blowing studio. That was in 1991. It doesn’t have beautiful views, but that’s probably a good thing as otherwise I might not get any work done at all. But it does have a fire station and ambulance next door, which is reassuring.”
Here Oriel not only designs, makes and displays (and sells) her work, but also inspires and supports other artists and designers who have studios in the same building as part of a cooperative. They include artist Maxine Bryher, textiles designer Emily Shaw, linocutter and ceramic decorator Vickie Heaney and silk painting artist Liz Askins. All happily receive visitors, and many run occasional workshops too.
Getting to this point in Oriel’s life has been quite a journey. She was brought up in Croydon, in Surrey. But from the age of seven her family holidayed in Scilly and from 14, she worked here every summer, doing jobs that ranged from lifting narcissus bulbs and planting cabbages to helping in guesthouses. She’d caught the Scilly bug.
At 16 Oriel forsook academic A levels to study Architectural Decoration at Reigate School of Art and Design where she studied everything from mosaics, stained glass and calligraphy to sculpture and print making. “Before I left school my headteacher said ‘You’ll never make a living being an artist.’ But fortunately my parents, both teachers, encouraged me and said ‘Do what you love.’ And I did love every minute.”
Oriel developed an affinity to glass and learned how to craft it. “I loved manipulating coloured light. I was blown away just looking at the boxes of mouth-blown glass samples in all their different colours.” In her thirties, she bagged her first major commission: a stained-glass window for a church in her home town of Croydon, still there today.
She married – a Scillonian of course – and had children and eventually settled on St. Mary’s, where she was commissioned to make a stained-glass window for the parish church. Oriel also learned to create Tiffany glass (developed in the US at the end of the 19th century by Louis Comfort Tiffany) and hot ‘fused’ glass which, as its name suggests, involves fusing pieces of glass at high temperature in a kiln. You’ll see plenty of the latter at the Phoenix Studios, including vibrantly blue fused glass fruit bowls that at first glance look like splashed water. “They’re proving really popular,” says Oriel. “Fusing is a technique that wasn’t widely known when I was at college so I sent myself on a course to learn it in 2004. I love doing it – opening the kiln to see how it’s turned out is like having Christmas every day.”
Tour St. Mary’s and other islands and there’s a good chance you’ll stumble across Oriel’s architectural work. Her stained-glass windows decorate the entrance doors to Hell Bay hotel on Bryher, and churches on Bryher, St. Mary’s and St. Agnes. The two windows in the tiny church on the beach of Periglis in St. Agnes are particularly poignant, as one features two of her sons in a pilot gig. Tragically one of them had died the previous year. Also in the boat is another man who had died at his paddle and a St. Agnes boatman who drowned. So, the window is a memorial to several deceased men.
Oriel’s most visible – and perhaps most unlikely – work, is the humble shelter on the Strand in Hugh Town. “It was actually a happy accident,” smiles Oriel. “A mosaic was due to be created in front of the old museum. But then the decision was made to move the museum. As the money was still there, I looked around for an alternative place to do something creative. Toby Hicks, a lad from St. Agnes who was then doing work experience with me, cleverly suggested the shelter and we got the green light to use the mosaic money to make a huge stained-glass window. I did the basic design and artists from all the islands contributed images to fill the panes which were shaped like the granite stones in St. Mary’s old quay. It was a truly collaborative effort and local people and visitors alike seem to love it.”
Image credit: adjbrown.com
