Nina Casson McGarva was born in Gloucester in 1990, but grew up in a community of makers near Nevers, France. She trained at the Ecole Nationale du Verre Jean Monnet, a technical college for workers in crystal glass factories, and at the Glass and Ceramics Workshop on Bornholm, part of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She has undertaken residencies at Pilchuck Glass School and Starworks Glass Lab, US, and with Nobuyasu Yoshida in Kobe, Japan. She was formerly an intern for Baldwin and Guggisberg, and an assis...
Read more
Nina Casson McGarva was born in Gloucester in 1990, but grew up in a community of makers near Nevers, France. She trained at the Ecole Nationale du Verre Jean Monnet, a technical college for workers in crystal glass factories, and at the Glass and Ceramics Workshop on Bornholm, part of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She has undertaken residencies at Pilchuck Glass School and Starworks Glass Lab, US, and with Nobuyasu Yoshida in Kobe, Japan. She was formerly an intern for Baldwin and Guggisberg, and an assistant to the glass sculptor Sally Fawkes. Her work was shown at the British Glass Biennale 2019, in 2020 at London Glassblowing’s Young Masters and in Es Grünt, Galerie Handwerk, Munich, and at Collect 2021; it currently features in Habatat’s 49th international glass exhibition.
In her own words about her work;
“The starting point in my work is nature. I take a detail of an element I find in nature and use it as an inspirational base to create my own abstraction, that then builds into a complex sculpture.
My inspiration comes from cycles of nature that I associate with glass because to me the material goes through a cycle and is at it's most alive when it’s hot and being transformed. The end result is solid and doesn’t move any longer, it is at the fragile time before disintegration and maintains a dynamic form and rich structures such as dry leaves, feathers or sea shells. In the making process I shape it hot in an open kiln until the glass stops moving. When the glass transforms to be a solid, the piece is finished”
Read less