CAROLINE REES
Caroline Rees trained as a textile designer and graduated from Brighton in the 1980s. She has worked as a freelance designer and for textile design studios in London, New York and Switzerland.
In the late 1990s a glass artist showed Caroline how to apply her distinctive style and stencil technique to glass and she was immediately captivated by sandblasting and the different effects that can be achieved when illuminated with natural or artificial light. She began to use the process to decorate glass vessels, working with hot glass artists to create bespoke shapes and colours.
Such was the demand for her vessels that in 2002 she opened her own gallery in Mumbles, Wales, and ran this with two other artists until 2007. During this period she changed her focus from the vessels to working on commissions for architectural sandblasted glass, enjoying the interaction and collaboration with the client. Initially the projects were for private homes but she soon began to take on larger scale public glass commissions.
In 2010 Caroline completed an MA in glass at The Swansea School of Glass and the following year she was fortunate to have met the Queen during the opening of a surgery in Windsor for which she created a 30m2 glass wall.
Caroline has now turned her attention to paper. Enjoying the immediacy and freedom from the technical constraints associated with glass she works alone in her studio with the simplest of materials to create striking laser and hand cut paper stencils.
Every morning, whatever the weather, Caroline walks the cliff path of the beautiful Gower Peninsula with her artist friend and some dogs. The people she meets, the dramatic coastal landscape and views across the bay to the 'lovely, ugly town' of Dylan Thomas's Swansea inspire her work. The scenes are re-imagined in her studio and the drawings are transformed into linear patterns which exaggerate the decorative characteristics of her surroundings.
