Chris Day: Looking Glass

This article was published in the September/October 2021 issue of Crafts magazine.

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Among the alabaster tombstones of a church in West Yorkshire is an unexpected sight: a table strewn with an installation of glass bottles that bulge through the thick copper coils encasing them, like bodies trying to break free from their shackles. In tones of orange-brown and blue, their contorted forms are positioned seemingly at random, with eight standing up and one lying on its side. The artwork evokes a sense of struggle for freedom, but also debauchery – like the aftermath of a banquet.

British glass artist Chris Day took inspiration for the installation, within All Saints Church at Harewood House, Leeds, from a collection of 18th-century bottles discovered in the stately home’s cellars in 2011 and still containing rum. These were products of the sugar harvested by people enslaved on plantations in the West Indies belonging to the Lascelles family, who formerly owned Harewood. Day made his ‘bottles’ using his distinctive technique of blowing molten glass into metal cages, to evoke the suffering, claustrophobia and fragility of enslaved people. He wants his sculptures to help ‘people like me, just normal, everyday folk’ to start having conversations about the treatment of Black people throughout history and the legacy of colonialism, something he has consistently addressed in his work. ‘The installation’s title Under the Influence references the intoxicating effect of slavery on those who benefited from it.’

Each piece is as individual as a person. ‘They’ve all got different sized heads and they’re all different shapes because I’m trying to replicate humanity,’ explains Day, who was born in 1968 to a Jamaican father and Anglo-Irish mother and currently lives in Lichfield, Birmingham. The bung of rope on the end of each bottle reminds him of the braided hair of many Africans, while the colouring of the distorted glass evokes their bruised and battered skin as they were packed into the lower decks of the ships that transported them to the Americas. The iridescent blue trails over the bottle’s surface suggest the sea across which these vessels travelled. Day also associates blue with royalty, elegance and the enormous profits that were made by European merchants from the slave trade. By recalling both the bottles of rum drunk by the English slave-owners and the bodies of the Africans they captured, this feast-like scene has cannibalistic overtones. Day points to the bottle lying on its side: ‘He’s had so much indulgence in the slave trade that he’s toppled over.’

His work directly confronts the history of the Harewood estate. ‘I don’t think you really can come to terms with the fact that all this extraordinary beauty at Harewood comes out of such brutality,’ says Hannah Obee, Harewood’s director of collections, programme and learning. In her view, Day’s work may create discomfort but it’s there to ‘encourage discussion, to bring people together’.

Day’s work draws on his own experiences of growing up mixed race on a predominantly white council estate in Derby. ‘I have used my craft to navigate what it means to be Black in the UK – and also white,’ he says. Having left school at 16, he had a successful career as a plumbing and heating engineer before deciding, at the age of 47, to realise a long-held dream and retrain as an artist. He enrolled at Wolverhampton School of Art in 2016, where he did a BA in Glass and Ceramics, and has just completed an MA in Design and Applied Arts. In the course of researching for his BA, he started to look into the history of the transatlantic slave trade, and of racial segregation in the US, and felt compelled to respond. ‘Every time I tried to research something, about the civil rights movement or segregation… it all related back to slavery.’ Art became a way for him to grapple with his feelings of being an ‘outsider’. For example, his early work Imposter Syndrome uses the motif of an ethereal glass bubble struggling to escape from a rusty cage as a metaphor for his uncertainty about who he was. He was drawn to glass because it seemed alive: ‘It wants to escape from you, and you’ve got to hone it and caress it into what you want.’

As a maker, Day translates the feeling for materials that he gained through being a plumber into a distinctive language. To create his rum bottles, for example, he begins by winding a length of copper microbore, a material used in plumbing, around a cylindrical shape such as a paint pot into a coil – he calls it a ‘slinky’. To preserve the coil’s shape and prevent it from collapsing under the weight of the glass, he binds it crosswise with electrical wire, and places it inside a galvanised steel bucket as an outer shell. He then melts a gather of glass from colour sticks. After blowing a small bubble, he dips it in a cauldron of transparent glass, as if ‘gathering syrup on a spoon’. He then inflates the bubble further and, with the aid of an assistant, trails lines of molten blue glass across its surface. Only at this stage can he lift the heavy, sagging, red-hot ball, which he has to keep he lift the heavy, sagging, red-hot ball, which he has to keep turning to preserve the shape, into the copper cage and blow it outwards. Making such works is an intense process on many levels, mentally and physically.

Notions of identity, segregation and enslavement run through all his work. His first major piece, made during his BA, was Strange Fruit, for which he won a special commendation at the British Glass Biennale 2019, and which now hangs in the corner of All Saints Church. It features stretched pieces of glass in amber, yellow and black, suggesting burnt and hacked flesh, which are attached to nooses of rope dangling from oversized meat hooks. The installation alludes to Abel Meeropol’s poem about the lynchings in America’s deep south. Day first listened to a recording of Billie Holiday’s sung version at Wolverhampton, and was transfixed. ‘It was like that rabbit in-the-headlights moment… When you listen to it, you think, “How can I translate that into art?”’

Strange Fruit was the first work to attract the attention of Angel Monzon, creative director of Vessel Gallery, which now represents him. Monzon was intrigued both by its ‘ugly-beautiful’ quality and the harrowing story behind it, a tension that he says is part of its power. As Day puts it, in making the work, he had to ask himself, ‘How can you produce a piece of work about lynching in America that won’t frighten people away?’ Vessel Gallery gave Day his first solo exhibition in autumn 2020, called Blown, Bound and Bold. The exhibits included Commodity Triptych, which presented enslaved Africans as black glass spheres packed onto sugar crates, and a series of glass spheres blown into copper cages and fitted onto ceramic bowls, to evoke their heads and shoulders. At Harewood, Day has made a new series of these heads for Congregation, an installation which refers to forced attendance at church. As with the rum bottles, each head has its own personality.

This year, his work has been acquired for the permanent collections of the V&A, the Chrysler Museum and National Museums Scotland. Looking ahead to 2022, Day will be collaborating on an installation with the stained-glass artist Grace Ayson in a showcase at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, as part of the UN Year of Glass celebrations. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and as the Black Lives Matter protests swept the globe, Day’s work captured attention for the way it articulated complex and often horrifying for the way it articulated complex and often horrifying moments in history with extraordinary sensitivity and nuance. ‘Whoever meets Chris is mesmerised by not only his creations but his storytelling skills,’ says Monzon.

Day is painfully aware of the under-representation of Black makers in the craft world. In a BBC interview last August, he observed that he was ‘perhaps the only Black glassblower in England’. On his BA course, he was disturbed to find a significant gap in his lecturers’ knowledge. ‘All you hear about are the same artists, the same white faces, and I said, “When are you going to talk to me about Black artists?”’

Since then, he has sought to make connections with other Black and mixed-race artists. One maker whom he looks up to is the Trinidadian-British Zak Ové, whose large-scale graphite statues have spurred Day to make greater use of metal. For instance, in Message in a Bottle, on display at of metal. For instance, in Message in a Bottle, on display at Harewood, a rough glass vessel reminiscent of an amphora lies on its side. It is wrapped in recycled chains and fenced in by rebar, the steel poles used to reinforce concrete. The title plays on the ‘romantic notion of being on a desert island and trying to get a message to someone’. The irony was that ‘the slaves couldn’t read and write – they couldn’t send out that message for them to be rescued’.

Day sees the Harewood show as an opportunity to engage with an audience beyond the art world, hoping that his ‘strange’ sculptures, with their disconcerting combination of warm, seductive glass and frigid, harsh metal, will hold the viewer’s attention for longer than a ‘nice ornate vase’. He is determined to use his work to strengthen the impetus of the Black Lives Matter movement ‘so people will keep talking about these issues’. This is both a choice and a compulsion: while he has tried to experiment with other themes, he keeps gravitating back to the history of racial discrimination. ‘At the moment there are just so many stories that need telling that I don’t think I’ll ever break free.’ His achievement is to communicate that sense of urgency to his audience.