Miranda Diamond is a glass artist living and
working in the Berkshire village of Cookham Dean. She graduated in Industrial
Design from
De Montfort University, Leicester. Having completed a postgraduate diploma
in Design for Film and Television she worked for ten years as a set designer
in the film industry. Miranda worked on many films including ‘Memphis
Belle’, ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’, Jim Henson’s ‘Greek
Myths’, ‘1492 Conquest of Paradise’, ‘Shakespeare
in Love’, ‘Interview with the Vampire’, ‘Judge Dredd’,
and many other commercials and T.V. TV series’. A
change of direction saw Miranda working on a solo career as an artist. Using
the many skills developed during her
film career she taught herself
to fuse and kiln-form glass. Last year she completed a commission for eight
large “lick-able” glass panels for the ‘Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory’ movie staring Johnny Depp. She has also completed
many private commissions and sells her work through galleries and craft shows. Miranda
is also very interested in children’s education and will run
workshops with small numbers of children in schools and for private parties. “The
children get a huge amount of confidence through being able to cut glass
successfully, it makes a very satisfying noise when it breaks. Children find
this very empowering, having been told so often that glass is dangerous and
they are not to touch” What does working with glass
mean to me? Glass is a medium that fascinates many artists.
It is a material that we grow up to respect. As children we begin to see glass
as something we should
not touch, it is too dangerous or too precious. We learn to fear how terribly
it could cut us and yet it protects us in our homes. We enjoy pressing our
foreheads against its coolness, breathing on it and writing in the steam.
Glass can be both terrifying and yet keep us safe. As
an artist I like to explore the many contradictory properties of glass. It
is both solid and liquid, hard and soft, fragile yet immensely strong,
non-permeable yet light travels through it, transparent or opaque, clear
or coloured, cold yet sensuous. I like to play with the
light that travels through the glass transmuting it into something magical.
I like to build layers of glass trapping fragments
of colour or form within tiny worlds. I like to imagine that you could get
lost within each piece.
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