In the 1970s, New Zealanders had very few opportunities to see studio glass blowing, with only Keith, Tony Kuepfer in Taranaki and Reg Kempton in Marlborough operating studios. It would seem that for both these reporters this was a new experience, and so they give very detailed accounts, and thus included a great deal of fascinating detail that a more blasé reporter would have omitted. Neither newspaper is currently available on-line, and so it seems useful to repeat them here, obviously with acknowledgements to the reporters and to the newspapers.
Sue Miller, Women's Editor of the Northern Advocate from Whāngārei, visited Keith quite soon after he had begun work in his studio ot Otonga. On 3 December 1976, she wrote:
'Working in the heat of a Northland summer beside a furnace
which is roaring away at over 1200C may not be everyone’s idea of the perfect
job. But for Keith Mahy, who is living several kilometres north of Hikurangi,
it is just what he wants. In fact it is what he gave up a senior position as a
designer at Crown Crystal in Christchurch about two years ago to do. And so,
while everyone else in Northland is trying to find a way to cool down, Keith
will be stoking up the furnace, heating up the kiln nearby and getting down to
work.
For Keith has taken up the age-old, traditional job of
glass-blowing, but without the usual six year apprenticeship and transforming
it into a modern art form. Until three months ago he had never physically
worked with glass, although he had spent five years preparing designs for
others to translate into finished articles. During that time he has watched and
studied the craftsmen at the Christchurch factory – union regulations forbid
him to actually try it himself. But through his designs and awareness of glass as a material
he felt he had become sensitive enough to try it for himself.
Two years ago,
with his wife and family, Keith left Christchurch and came to Northland,
searching for land where they could live, grow vegetables all year round and
make a clean break from their previous existence. After finding a farm cottage
out of Hikurangi, they settled down and he’s prepared all the necessary
equipment and took time to find out as much as he could about the total
process. To ensure some income he took up some other crafts – leatherwork and
furniture making.
About three months ago he began his work as a glassblower
stop since then he has worked conscientiously, experimenting, improving,
building up stocks and finding outlets for his work. He works regular hours,
tries to achieve a set target each day, and approaches his work in a very
practical way. Every aspect was thought out, the costs involved were
investigated and as many details as possible we worked out in advance. This is
because glass is one of the more expensive crafts to become involved in. Keith
purchases off-cuts and broken glass from Crown Crystal in Christchurch by the
drumful. This simplifies the process considerably, as instead of having to
start the complicated glass-making process from scratch, he only needs to heat
the glass and liquefy it.
Because of the intense heat needed to melt the glass, and
the time taken to reach this heat, the furnace is left burning 24 hours a day.
Oil-fired, the furnace burns its way through about 90 litres of oil a day. And
the kiln has to be left heated day and night to call the finished product at
the specified temperatures to prevent shattering. The glass off-cuts Keith
receives are clear and to these he adds various metal oxides to achieve
different colours.'
[The original caption to these two photographs was:
'With the furnace on one side and the kiln on the other it
does not take very long to become very hot in the three sided shed north of
Hikurangi which Keith Mahy uses as a studio for his glass-blowing. Pictured
left and right is Keith concentrating on shaping the molten glass to a bubble
and then a jar. He tends to follow the shape developed by the material,
preferring to let the material work for itself. Very intense process which
requires a great deal of concentration, he finds the peacefulness and solitude
of a farm in Northland the right atmosphere for this sort of work.']
'In the furnace he keeps two pots of the liquid glass, one
clear and one coloured. And armed with a long hollow metal rod he “gathers” the
glass on the end of the rod to start the process. Blowing gently; returning it
to the heat of the furnace; blowing; swinging the pipe and growing bubble;
dimpling the pliable material to obtain large air pockets; pulling with pliers
to obtain peaks and shapes on the outside of the glass; suddenly immersing it
in cold water to crack the glass.
Constantly returning the growing form to the furnace and then eventually
putting it completed into the kiln to cool. It is a fascinating process to
watch as the craftsman concentrates on his work. And it is an extremely
satisfying one for him.
Originally interested as a young man at art school in
sculpture, Keith regards his work as a glass-blower a continuation of this. He
feels his work to be a type of glass sculpture, but by making jars, bowls,
vases, cups and jugs, ashtrays and similar practical objects, he feels he has
achieved a happy compromise between making a living and concentrating purely on
an art form. Still very new to the process, he is more interested in developing
the form in his work than in achieving perfection and the quality of his glass.
However, he does hope that as he eventually becomes more experienced he will
reach a balance between form and glass quality. He feels the possibilities
which can be obtained through the combinations of form and colour to be
immense, and is constantly experimenting with oxides and temperatures to
achieve different colours. Until now it has been largely through chance rather
than intention that he has obtained the colours he has. Intensity of colour can
be obtained by increasing the number of “gathers” in the coloured liquid glass
or reduced by a combination of coloured and clear “gathers”.
In the short time he has been glass-blowing, Keith is found
quite a considerable amount of interest in his work. Several shops in the fun
array area stock his glass, and on visits to Auckland with van-loads of his
work he has only had to visit two shops before the van is empty. There are
others in New Zealand doing this type of work, but they are scattered around
the country fairly sparsely.'
The second article, written by Liz Bulleid, appeared two years later in the New Zealand Herald on 10 January 1979, not long before Keith's move from Otonga to Pahi:
'Anyone wandering past Keith Mahy’s place, north of
Hikurangi, could not be blamed for thinking he was taking the odd pot shot at
them. After all, he has the reputation in the area of being someone who gets
very heated at times. However, 31-year-old Keith, who for the past two years
has spent most of his time in a derelict milking shed in the middle of a
paddock, is far from hostile.
He is a full-time glassblower, probably one of only three in
the country. From the road his “studio” would never be noticed if it were not
for the odd explosion and the halo of yellow light surrounding it at nightfall.
Keith Mahy is making a living from blowing glass but is still feeling his way
and trying out new ideas to satisfy his own curiosity about the substance that
fascinates him so much. To do this he has had to face some shattering
experiments. Minutes after coaxing a red-hot blob of glass into the shape of an
elegant vase, his prize piece can shatter into hundreds of pieces, only to be
swept up and recycled.
But Keith is unperturbed when this happens. “You didn’t want
to buy that one did you?” He grins as another disappears into the night.
Normally this need not happen. When he is working seriously and intends selling
the finished product, he puts them in his kiln to cool slowly. “I’ve just had a
good day today and the kiln is already full of finished work, so I am just
playing around tonight”, he says. “Putting them out in the cold night air cools
them too quickly. I don’t think we’ll end up with anything this time.”
As he pulls the door of his home-made furnace open the glare
from the sea of white-hot glass inside makes him reel slightly. He wipes the
beads of sweat off his forehead and wriggles into his favourite blowing shoes –
a pair of semi-detached sneakers, ripped around the seams for “good
ventilation”. For the past 24 hours Keith Mahy has been feeding his furnace
with bottles he has collected around the neighbourhood, subjecting them to
temperatures of up to 1500°C. He puts in a metal blowpipe and gathers a blob of
glowing glass like treacle on a spoon. With all the sensitivity of a musician
playing a wind instrument, though he says he has never played one, he blows
through the pipe and the bubble on the end turns into a light bulb.
With all the precision of a drum major as he twirls the pipe
in his hands and goes through carefully rehearsed steps, keeping the glass
moving while it is still hot. He rolls it sitting in his special wooden
armchair, thrusts it back into the furnace, allows the fat blob to grow to
twice its length and patterns it with a few carefully aimed prods. If the
result does not reach expectations then it is thrown back into the furnace to
be born again. Turning out a different piece every ten minutes makes Keith’s
job appear deceptively easy. But if he does not act quickly once he has the
glass out of the furnace it can turn into an uncontrollable mess. His skill
lies in the way he can coax it according to a whim without it ever eluding him.
In spite of the idyllic setting, Keith admits that like most
people the job sometimes gets him down. “It gets so hot in here I get very
short tempered at times. To counteract that I prime myself up beforehand on
plenty of water and glucose”. Then when he decides he has done his dash for the
day he has to give his body time to adjust to the change in temperature before
setting out across the paddocks in the cool night air to his home. If he does
not he is likely to catch a chill.
But this might not be a problem for too much
longer. Keith is planning to move to land he has bought on the Kaipara Harbour
where he is building an underground studio and kiln.'
Keith Mahy grew up in Whakatane, and he made use of his contacts there to hold exhibitions of his work in 1977 and 1982.These two cuttings are from the Whakatane Beacon in 1977:
An unattributed 1982 cutting in the Mahy scrapbook, probably from the Northern Advocate, was written after he had moved to Pahi.
It reads:
'Glass forms born of leaf shapes
Each piece of Keith Mahy’s hand blown glass is unique.
Patterns of native foliage framed by the semi-circular barn in which he works
have inspired most of the shapes – from the strong, plain lines of his goblets
and bowls to the fantastical swirls and flow featured in his vases and
decanters – but the fluid medium in which he creates has led to a ‘chance
effect’ in the end product.
‘What I produce could be called mass-produced because I turn
out a lot of the same things,’ he says, ‘but because I free-blow, everything
comes out totally individual.’ Mr Mahy often does not know what is he is going
to create until just before he starts to blow. The spontaneity shows in his
work: many pieces appear to have grown, and frozen in place, naturally, rather
than having been made from a static design. Even his rejects are eye-catching.
At one shop in Christchurch display of his ‘failures’ – a stand of saggy wine
goblets – could have been sold several times over. Mr Mahy has been blowing
glass for a living for six years, two of these on his 10-acre block overlooking
a Kaipara inlet off the Pahi road, but he maintains he still has only relative
control of the medium in which he works.
 |
| Keith Mahy in his Pahi studio in 1982 (photographer unknown) |
He loves working with glass. He talks about its ‘human
vitality’ – and is constantly experimenting. ‘Lots of things I do I have seen
somewhere but I am not totally influenced by that. I try to get a fresh
approach.’ Many of his ideas are taken from the native Bush outside his studio,
he says.
A graduate from Elam School of Fine Art in Auckland, Mr Mahy
considered glass as a ‘sculptural (three-dimensional) medium’ only after
designing for Crown Crystal in Christchurch. He had no models to emulate when
he went out on his own. He welded his own blowing irons (ponteils, or puntys as
they are called in New Zealand), carved his own shaping tools (‘pear-wood is
the best’) and accumulated and adapted conventional tools for cutting and
working the hot glass. Friends and neighbours supply him with ‘empties’: he
prefers to use recycled glass to making his own. He claims that enthusiasm (‘I
get a kick from the physical properties of the material’) and hard work have
carried him to the stage where he really enjoys what he does.
He blows entirely ‘by eye’. Pulling out a small
molten lump of glass from his oil-fired furnace (which runs 24 hours a day) on
his punty he puffs, cradles and rolls until the desired shape is formed stop
the finished article is then called or ‘relaxed’ in the annealing kiln. Up to
15 minutes is spent on each piece, although many take a lot less time.'
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In my last two blogs I have talked about the late Keith Mahy, one of New Zealand's pioneer studio glass makers. Recently, since I was in the vicinity, I found out from friends where the site of Keith's second studio was, on the Pahi Peninsula in the Kaipara harbour. %2B416%2BPahi%2BRoad%2BFeb%2B2015%2B15.JPG)
Keith bought the land here in 1979, and built the house and studio, moving in with his family in 1980. They were here until he moved again, to Whāngārei, to take up a position as Tutor, Glass and Design at Northland Polytechnic
