Gregory Warren Wilson

GREGORY WARREN WILSON’s brilliantly colourful and innovative work in glass plays with the translucent nature of the material. Each piece is conceived on multiple layers – sometimes as many as six – and these layers allow light to interact with the glass spatially, penetrating the depths within each frame. The designs he makes sparkle and scintillate, and they appear to move as you look at them.

Warren Wilson’s work is, in part, sculptural. Each piece can only exist in three dimensions, and the glass interacts with the play of light spatially. His work invites the eye to exult in pure colour, and also to investigate the mysterious depths of the space that the designs inhabit within their bespoke frames.

Having lived for many years in Italy and Australia, light is crucial to his work as an artist. The tesserae he uses are hand-cut in Murano, and the irregularity of each unique piece enlivens the surface of his work, refracting light in ways that are eye-catching and unpredictable. Each of his designs is made with great precision so that the individual tesserae reflect and refract light in an extraordinary variety of ways.

Warren Wilson is a prize-winning poet. He has published five collections and was awarded an Arts Council Grant in 2008. A number of his glass designs take as their starting point a fragment of poetry. Over time, his visual response develops into a ‘correlative’, resulting in a glasswork that exists in its own right, while alluding, albeit obliquely, to the original literary source.

Gregory Warren Wilson

Moonlight on Fast-Flowing Water

GREGORY WARREN WILSON writes:
THIS PIECE was originally made as part of an extended series – collectively called Venice by Night – in which I investigated the effects of light falling on water in Venice at night. (Twenty years ago a friend and I pooled our resources and bought a flat in Venice, and over the years I’ve spent a good deal of time exploring the city during the day and at night too.)
I particularly wanted Moonlight on Fast-flowing Water to have a silver-leafed frame in order to complement the mercurial effects of moonlight, and in the end this excluded it from the Venice by Night series, all of which are framed in black. For this reason this piece stands alone, although in my mind it relates very closely to the series represented in the illustrated catalogue Venice by Night (Raphael Press, 2024).
The central square of silver-leaf was hand-beaten in Mario Berta’s workshop in Venice – the last atelier in Europe where gold-leaf and silver-leaf are still being beaten by hand. Mario’s workshop is within the house where Titian lived and worked.
This piece’s optical effects are achieved by light passing through seven layers of glass. For this reason the frame is deep, and the layers of glass are carefully spaced within it. When light is reflected and refracted through these layers it gives the impression of movement. Venice is in fact tidal – the lagoon’s water sluices through the city twice a day – so the reflections on the water are constantly in motion.
The blue glass that I chose for this piece is pale and compared with the darkness of the water in Venice at night, but this particular blue suited the effect I wanted to conjure. It highlights the moonlight – as if a radiant full moon were illuminating an expanse of water. For me, this piece also refers obliquely to the expression ‘once in a blue moon’.