Stourbridge gallery space opens doors to heritage festival for first time
A Black Country art gallery has welcomed new guests for exhibitions and talks as part of a national heritage festival.
The General Office Gallery and Studios in Stourbridge has opened its doors to the public for the week as part of Heritage Open Days, England’s largest festival of history and culture and which offers free access to heritage events and activities.
Since the festival launched on Friday, September 8, visitors to General Office on Hagley Road have been able to enjoy an exhibition of recent works by local glass makers, with works on show revealing a variety of traditional methods alongside contemporary studio glass.
The exhibition, called "A Celebration of Glass" is the first of a new annual celebration of local glass making from the Stourbridge Glass Quarter and showcases the works of six diverse makers by featuring traditional copper wheel engraving, cameo glass and enamelling and contemporary studio glass and sculptural works.
Visitors on Saturday were also able to hear a talk from glass artist Georgia Redpath, who spoke about her practice and new work and about both her inspiration, which is the patterns and structures found in nature, and her approach to the process of kiln cast glass.
Heritage Open Days:
Curator Simon Meddings said the gallery had seen a good few visitors through the doors since the launch of Heritage Open Days and spoke about what he wanted to achieve from being part of the festival.
He said: "We have about 10 people come to Georgia's talk about her work and process and that was fascinating as it's part of her PhD research, plus we also held a preview event which, despite the hot weather, we still had quite a few visitors for.
"People have been coming from Birmingham to see the show, so we've been doing very well in something we've been involved with for the first time after talking about doing a glass festival.
"It's good to do it and helps us to plan to work with the Go Gallery and the Glass museum and other like-minded people to do an annual celebration of glass, so we're going to see how the next few days go to just how it goes for us.
"The festival is a nationwide thing and there's a lot of people who have planned to go to different places and say they were there, so we'll get those people coming in and look to see how many other guests we'll get and, possibly, get a whole new audience from it."
General Office is open every day of the Heritage Open Days festival until Sunday, September 17, open from 11am to 4pm.
To find out more, go to generaloffice.co.uk
