Meet Amanda Simmons
Amanda Simmons has worked with glass for the past twenty years after a previous career in engineering and medicine. She graduated from London’s Central St Martins School of Art & Design with Distinction after studying for a Postgraduate Certificate in Glass & Architecture. She is now based in Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland where she conducts a variety of online glass teaching courses.
Amanda is influenced by our emotional responses to contemporary objects and the connection we build with inanimate items. The starting point to all her work is connection - either with emotion, colour, language or music - and from there she will investigate how others have looked at the same notion, making a visual representation.
Amanda is exhibited in a number of public collections, including; The Fitzwilliam Museum, The National Museum of Scotland, Perth Museum and Art Gallery and Scotland and Ernsting Stuftung Glass Museum.
About The Work
Amanda makes kilnformed glass objects, exploiting gravity and the heat of the kiln to manipulate and form her complex glass artworks. Her use of opaque glass powders give her pieces their signature textural pattern and tone; their varying translucency changes the appearance of the work depending upon the light they are in. After the form has elongated in the kiln, her pieces are finished using many coldworking techniques to shape and mark the glass. These include sandblasting, hand lapping, diamond point and wheel engraving.
Her most recent body of work is based on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (Piano Sonata No.14) and her appreciation of the different phases of the moon.
