Neil Wilkin is Britain's most important hot-glass maker. He is a product of the studio glass movement but within that two entirely different things: an artist in his own right with a vision that he uses his own skills to articulate; and a glass master in the old sense of the term, a leader coordinating the multiple skills and abilities of a team to realise the visions of other artists. These two separate though related aspects of Wilkin and his work need always to be borne in mind.

There are other master glass blowers in the studio movement through whose virtuoso artistry others can realise their dreams and aspirations but how many when given the freedom to express them- selves actually have something personal to say, something which makes them artists rather than just super crafts people. He raises certain issues with regard to the production of the work of art. We still like to think of the art object as the product of a single individual -the artist as conceptualiser and realiser, though in fact this is a diminishing aspect of art in our own time. The single most important development in the art of the twentieth century was the emergence of new media, subject matter and changing audience perceptions and participation. Mass media such as film and television have so shattered the boundaries between art and entertainment that it is impossible to re erect them; they may have vanished forever.

Even sport has become such a mass communication phenomenon that it and its presentation can be argued as performance art, meeting our needs at much than just physical and intellectual levels. Alongside these mainly visual, i.e. screen stimulations, there have been other equally dramatic developments. The factory control of style, form and decoration, which limited the scope and creative status of the decorative arts, has disappeared, replaced by another mass movement- the collective efforts of legions of individuals and small group[s working in a plethora of old craft and decorative art disciplines and giving them a status they have never before enjoyed before in western culture. Whilst solo production may be normal in the later group, complexity scale and multi media production increasingly demand group participation and it is now quite acceptable for the work of art to be an expression of a plural activity in which even government and control may shift by mutual consent between group vision and skill.

When Neil Wilkin was born in 1959, glass in Britain was a factory product; a material used in the large-scale manufacture of domestic, utilitarian artefacts and of aesthetically ambiguous objects meant to satisfy middle class notions of respectability and affluence.

On the continent, artists and designers were utilising traditional skills and resources to create styles and fashions that responded to and expressed current needs and directions in the arts. In Britain, however, that drive had not emerged. Glass had little cultural meaning and status and played hardly any part in the arts of its time. Artists like John Hutton and Lawrence Whistler worked on glass as engravers rather than in glass itself, and the masters in the factories, whatever their dreams and aspirations may have been were treated merely as artisans in the manufacture of profitable yet mostly valueless trivia: things to meet material wants rather than spiritual needs. That these masters took pride in their work, that they strove to raise standards and aspirations we can take for granted, that is the nature of such people, but rarely did they become more than low key contributors to a gross national product. Sadly undervalued resources underpinning directionless effort.

When Neil went to college in 1977, Britain and glass had both experienced revolutions. Britain had made an egalitarian declaration of independence from institutional respectability and conformity. In music, fashion, film, and many other areas we had discovered a talent for self expression and promotion and a content and message that amazed us all. Also glass had emerged in colleges of art as a discipline which immediately took off as a medium, a language in which one could discover and develop the voice to state a personal identity and its responses and reactions to the worlds around and within.

Much has been said about those wildly energetic and hedonistic days of the 60's and 70's but rarely has sufficient credit been given in the story of glass to those masters who emerged from the moribund confines of the factory system and made their experience available to the young emerging glass artists. Glass is not plasticine. It is extremely demanding, seductive and can be very dangerous. If you would perform in glass you must master many skills and the very foundations of the studio glass movement are laid on the skills and profound wisdom of masters like Stan Gill, the technician at North Staffordshire Polytechnic who taught Neil Wilkin the basics of his profession and who helped to fire his imagination and ambitions.

When Wilkin left college in 1981, glass was moving in various directions. In the 60's and 70's it had been primarily a hot glass practice, the furnace, glory hole and marvering table limiting as well as inspiring progress. The early 80's saw casting and kiln forming techniques expanding and offering, as they had done Czech artists a couple of decades earlier, an entirely new range of sculptural and decorative possibilities. Glass became a multi faceted media, its expanding developments difficult to contain under one umbrella. Wilkin stayed with hot glass, there was little temptation to do ought else, he was totally committed to it and to perfecting its traditional expressions as vehicles for contemporary usage and to using his own skills to make for others as well as himself. It is in this role, as realiser of other peoples dreams that he is most happy, most at home and most fulfilled. It is a peculiar role. Many artists bring life, through their own interpretations to the work of long dead as well as living masters - composers -visualisers. That is what performance is all about. But to be that vehicle which allows someone else to travel the routes of their own creativity is something special. The list of people he has worked with over the years is most impressive and too long to deal with here. Some of them, like engravers, need him to make the blanks, which they will then apply, their own arts to. He helps them develop the forms they will carve but rarely feels more than a supplier. Others such as sculptors need his skills to produce those elements of their work which they can see in the finished object, but which their own abilities and experience shaped by working in different materials, or by lack of access to glass, prevent them from achieving. They come to him with varying demands, uncertain of how exact they can be. The resulting relationship can surprise all parties. His main work however is with those people who come to glass because it excites them, demands their attention, inspires their dreams, but who can only attain those dreams through his control of skill.

When he began this work he did so as a solo operator occasionally using the assistance of whoever was at hand -such was studio glass. Over the years, as skills increased, the dreams got bigger and more ambitious and increasingly difficult to handle. The number of hands required to give them shape has increased. He now works with a team of eight. If any one artist is responsible for this it is Peter Bremers with whom he has been associated since 1992. Bremers is one of those artists who dreams on his feet and with Wilkin to keep opening doors and extend possibilities they have together pushed all notions of personal limitations aside and entered that zone where anything could happen.

From being a sole performer Wilkin has become the orchestrator the lead voice in a combine of multiple talents, many hands, skills empathies and understandings. The people who make up this team bring their own experience, abilities and needs to the undertaking they may have specific roles to play in the operation but once it takes off and starts to travel they all have to shift and meet whatever if demanded of them. It's almost like a gang form of abstract expressionism, a wildly stimulating high speed drive on shifting ground in which the struggle for control leads to greater speed rather than slowing down. All fight together for an end, which only becomes visible as they catch sight of it. A race that allows little change in direction and no chance to reverse and play the last bit over. All rush together for that goal whose realisation they all bring about.

How does this activity affect him when he comes to do his own thing; his own work? Performing as he does with such an enormous range of diverse talent makes him the sum total of a range of experiences that few artists can begin to appreciate. Left to his own devices, the workaholic given free reign with his own facilities, he works for the sheer joy of playing with the material and the processes he lives with; he plays. That is what he tells you. But it isn't as flippant or facile as that sounds. He is a very accomplished designer as his numerous commissions demonstrate, and he loves combining glass with other materials to meet quite specific functions and roles. His Aurelia chandelier is as much free form engineering as art. Glass and steel sculpture conceived to fit a particular space and do a specific job.

He does not talk about his work as art; he is far too busy doing it to get bogged down in endless and pointless arguments. Sometimes he takes a particular job on because it sets definable challenges and poses interesting problems. Other times ideas appear amidst what is going on around him, suggesting directions that may or may not lead anywhere.

It is always the case with art, work itself inspires new work and what begins life doing one job may lead to totally different ideas. Other notions are conscious responses to natural forms, usually plants and vegetation, that get distilled and digested and eventually restructured. There are in fact three features about his current private production that stand out. Firstly it doesn't employ complex hot glass processes. It is coolly cerebral rather than emotional and intensely physical. Constructions of multiple pieces of clear or single colour glass, icicles, petals, threads, many of them made by members of his working team rather than himself. Secondly, much of the work combines glass with other materials, metal, stone, wood and it is the combination and contrast of these various materials and qualities that is at the root of the work. Thirdly, many of the pieces are made to live outdoors, not necessarily site specific, but having taken their existence, their form, from nature have gone back to live in it. In his own garden which due to pressure of work is not the victim of mindless manicure and tonsure, they live happily moving even sounding in the grass and verbage, dripping water, catching, holding, flashing sunlight. Carefully considered, finely wrought and engineered structures. Man made homage to nature, the ultimate precision engineer. Today, glass in Britain is one of the most adventurous and exciting of those activities we call the arts. It has moved out of the factories with all their crippling profit-bound restrictions and its real centres of production are now the colleges of art, the ever-expanding number of studio operations, and the galleries that exhibit and support them.

Every year the range of activity increases. Architecturally, sculpturally, decoratively hot and cold glass expands its potential and complexity and its ability to present and solve fresh problems. Neil Wilkin is a key figure in the ongoing development of this movement and its relevance to our aesthetic and practical needs. As the master, the coordinator of group skills and the vehicle for the creative activity of others he keeps alive traditions of glass making older than glass in Britain, and on home ground he is without peer and sought internationally for his skills. As an artist in his own right he brings an approach, a vision, an artistry that challenges us and expands our awareness of what glass is and can do, and Britain and British glass are the richer for his presence.

May 2001