Making Light workshop with Michael Ruh
Join glassmaker Michael Ruh for an intimate 2.5-hour capturing light for photos and film workshop held within the Intersection exhibition space.
In this session, Michael will use glass pieces from the Intersection exhibition along with water, metal, wood and paper, and using your mobile phone torches, he’ll help create ethereal luminous images to photograph and film.
Michael is proposing a workshop of ten people to make it an intimate experience and to maximise individual guidance.
Suitable for beginners as well as those with photography and film experience.
All materials provided.
Duration: 2.5 hours
Price: £45
Places limited to 10 participants
About Michael Ruh Studio
Michael Ruh Studio is based in South London, founded in 2004 by Michael Ruh and Natascha Wahl, who work alongside a small team of glassmakers. It was built on the premise of making with a material that already existed: optical glass, the ultra-pure glass used in lenses, which the studio sources as industrial waste and remakes by hand.
The studio makes lighting, tableware and objects in small batches and to order. It also takes on commissions with interior designers, architects and brands looking for a creative collaboration, developing each one through conversation, hand-drawn sketches, colour studies and prototypes made in glass.
Michael Ruh
Michael trained first as a sculptor, at Drake University in Iowa and the University of Denver, before turning to glass at the Instituut voor Kunstambachten in Mechelen, Belgium, in 1992. He has worked with the material ever since.
What holds him is its contradictions: liquid one moment, permanent the next, and never quite the same twice, so that even after three decades it demands his full attention. Within a craft largely unchanged for centuries, he has developed his own language, including a technique, and the tools for it, to scribe lines inside vessels while the glass is still hot. His colours come from arid landscapes at the end of the day, the slow shift from sundown into darkness.
His work has been shown at Collect at the V&A and is held in the collections of the National Museum of Scotland and Blackwell, The Arts & Crafts House.
Natascha Wahl
Natascha began her career in architectural glass and as the Michael Ruh Studio Managing Director, she guides commissions from first conversation to installation. With her architect's understanding of glass in space, and a maker of glass sculptures, Natascha was invited to exhibit her work in this exhibition.
Sadly, Natascha’s brother recently passed away, and as a dedication to her brother, and as an acknowledgement of Bell House inviting Natascha, Michael will donate 50% of the money raised from the workshop to the Survivors UK Charity.
Natascha chose the Survivors UK charity “in memory of my brother Carsten, who died suddenly this year aged 61. As a young boy he suffered sexual abuse, and he carried that pain silently for the rest of his life without ever receiving help. I hope this support reaches men who can still find the help he never had.”
