Dispatch From The Dust

By Anselm Croze

The verdant green surrounding me as I write this on the Athi Kapiti plains belies the hollow-eyed drought that was staring us in the face. A few days of tropical monsoon have transformed our dry environs into a lush bucolic paradise.

I feel we appreciate it more because we are always on the cusp of it being just a little too dry. The Limuru lawns of my youth remain a memory because the amount of water needed to maintain even a postage stamp patch of grass is not justifiable here.

I was a callow youth when we moved to the Kitengela plains in 1979. My main obsession was raising baby birds and playing with electronics. When I finished my schooling, lower and upper, I decided to help my mum out in her business of stained glass making.

After a short course in France circa 1990 with some Dutch glassmakers, the objective of which was to encounter hot glass for the first time, I was properly hooked. We needed to try and make flat glass to mitigate the cost of the properly expensive coloured sheets in our stained-glass panels.

Having discovered the magic of the melt, I found there was a lot more that could be made - and so the journey began. Part of my original mission was to inculcate a new (old) craft – the Kenyan aptitude for hand working clay, wood, bone, metal, and beads seemed to miss the medium of glass, so why not?

It hasn’t all been plain sailing. Little in glass making is but that’s part of the fun – the capricious nature of our molten mistress is what makes her so alluring to those of us that gather to her whim.

I was installing a piece in Nyali over the weekend – an entrance portico of green glass banana leaves that create a wash of emerald cool as you approach the front door. It rained pretty much continuously while I was drilling the panels into place. Fortunately, the stainless-steel framing, me and the glass itself are all waterproof. The tools not so much, so we worked under jua-kali umbrellas and plastic sheeting to avoid smoking the Makita.The leaf sections were cut from blown plates – the stock that we use for the technique we call ‘funky fencing’. It’s a homegrown discipline. Like most things we do the style and skill have evolved on the job and my guys have, to coin a phrase, cracked it.

Our style of blowing is generally bit rough and ready. The soda-lime window and bottle glass we use is not designed for the hand, so we’ve had to figure out a slightly swifter methodology to accommodate the rapid cooling and loss of plasticity that happens when working with recycled glass. One of the things that we’ve had to learn is how to accept the limitations of our medium and take advantage of the speed that we need to get things done.

My current favourite product is the ‘thumbler’ – so dubbed by my brother Lengai because it looks like your thumb is bulging the glass inwards. I like it because it really feels like you’ve got a good grip on the piece and the optical and physical illusion is that you have, indeed, distorted the object with the power of your grip. We’re also working on a series of giant garden chandeliers – another of our homegrown styles is the jua-kali assembly of huge pieces. An adjunct to one of our other favourite products, the garden jewellery, these generally have a floral flair – foliage lends itself well to the inspiration underlying these glass creations. The tough organic nature of our material, its inherent fluidity and the frozen magic of light and bubbles all enhance the effect of a captured moment of time, a piece of right now, forever.

The variety of products that we offer our clientele is borne of survival in the business climate – like the ubiquitous corner shop, we had to try to offer anything anyone wanted in the way of glass. The challenge now comes in curating our product range, a process of tidying the cobwebby catalogue, if you will.

Anyway - I must get back to the grindstone – my hungry furnace roars in the background, needing feeding with energy – both human and hydrocarbon - so that we can milk it of the honeyed glass within.