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By: Peter Bonnell

Peter Bonnell discusses Them and Us by Richard William Wheater

In the course of making Them and Us the Yorkshire based artist Richard William Wheater utilized his expert glassmaking skills and a hand built mobile furnace to create a unique glass bird relevant to a diverse range of locations across England. These carefully chosen sites, including Beaulieu Park in the New Forest, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and even a fishing boat off the coast of Cornwall, became backdrops to a series of site-specific actions. By fabricating the glass birds on site Wheater attempted a wholly futile action – that of mimicking Mother Nature. He further accentuated this by, as he describes it, deliberately "setting the bird free" – an action that saw him take the still-molten bird from his furnace and fling it high into the air. This brief bathetic moment in time (documented fully by photographs) and resultant destructive landing became the climax to each action. Wheater's actions, and the objects he makes, are tethered in the natural world but also highlight the loss of traditional manufacturing skills that were once common throughout Britain. By keeping alive traditional skills such as glassblowing Wheater himself taps into growing contemporary...

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