These classes, taught by Eilidh Keith and Geraldine McSporran, have fostered the talents of many contemporary artists who have gone on to forge successful careers in stained glass making. They have also proved a wellspring for important new works, including a recent window for Glasgow Cathedral to mark the city’s 850th anniversary.
Now, with little notice, the GSA has decided to shut the studio and end the classes, severing the institution’s last link to the craft which played a central role in Mackintosh’s work, and in making the Mack building such a treasure.
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Tomorrow, some of those affected will stage a protest outside the building. “It’s awful,” said Anne Ferguson, a former textile designer and GSA lecturer, who attended classes at the studio in the early 2000s, and is now an established stained glass artist. “This is a heritage skill that’s going to be lost if people can’t continue with it.”
Ferguson went on to win prestigious commissions, including a window for St Mun’s Church in Dunoon, created in conjunction with children from the local primary school. “I think it’s important [for the classes] to have the kind of profile [that an art school brings] so it has that level of design quality and it’s not just something people take up as a hobby,” she said.
Deborah Houston has been attending stained glass classes at the studio since she lost her job in higher education 10 years ago. “Glasgow is the second city after London when it comes to stained glass and the GSA is its natural home here,” she said.
“But beyond its historical importance, it was also a valuable social space. The classes were creative, mindful, therapeutic: a real community. How does closing one of the city’s last continuing education courses help with widening access? It doesn’t.”
The GSA has spent the last 11 years engulfed in controversy over the two Mack building fires. Its director Tom Inns resigned in 2018 after the second fire. His replacement, Professor Penny Macbeth, was appointed in 2020.
Houston, who has produced beautiful fan light stained glass for her own doors, says the tutors were only told of the decision to close the school in early June, and that she found out by chance when a classmate, who had signed up for the summer school, realised it wasn’t on. Only when she contacted the GSA directly was an email sent out to regular attenders.
The GSA has said it is working closely with affected staff “to explore all possible options, including opportunities for redeployment within the GSA”, but given there is no longer any requirement for stained glass artists this is understood to be unlikely.
“I think increasingly the [GSA] is moving away from fine art disciplines towards more conceptual art disciplines,” Houston said. “I don’t claim to understand conceptual art, but I acknowledge it as equal and as good as anything fine art may be doing. Similarly, I think the value of fine art should be acknowledged.”
Other sources have pointed to financial imperatives such as the need to increase student numbers.
The studio consisted of three sections: a workshop with five benches and four light boxes; an equipment room with cutters, soldering irons, grinders and kilns; and a storage space where the glass was kept.
There was no real overlap with GSA students — no stained glass module as part of a wider degree course — but last year fine art undergraduate Aoife Hogan, who was being mentored by Keith, was given permission to use the facilities.
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“My gran had studied Murals and Stained Glass at the GSA back in the late 60s,” she said. “When I was coming to the end of secondary, we went along to one of the summer schools together. I really enjoyed it. It’s what made me want to study art.”
When Hogan was in her third year at the GSA, her gran died suddenly. Hogan decided she wanted to go back to making stained glass as a means of keeping a close connection.
This was only possible because she had kept in touch with Keith who allowed her to use the studio. There, Hogan created the art works which, earlier this month, earned her a first class degree. “I live on the coast at Skelmorlie and my work was all about the relationship between the sea and the city and the way the colours of the sea continually shift” she said.
Hogan believes many of her fellow students would have jumped at the opportunity to work in stained glass. She is worried the closure will undermine Glasgow’s heritage. “It’s not enough to preserve stained glass, you have to keep it alive,” she said. “When people say it’s not relevant any more, that’s only because it’s not being made relevant by new people coming in and expanding the craft.”
Harvard graduate Talia Blatt started attending the classes during a year-long fellowship in Glasgow. At the same time, she was volunteering as a guide on a stained glass-focused tour of Glasgow Cathedral. When those she worked alongside realised she was a talented stained glass maker, she was commissioned to make a five-panel window with support from the Glasgow Glass Studio in Dennistoun. Her creation — the building under a moonlit sky with some of the city’s stories etched into its walls —was unveiled earlier this month, just as word of the closure was beginning to leak out.
Blatt is now back home in Boston and looking for classes there. “The UK has all these amazing buildings with stained glass windows and, in a decade or so, we will be in a crisis, because there won’t be enough people with the knowledge and skills to repair them,” she said.
Houston has been busy making placards for the protest. She claimed the GSA had recently accepted a bequest of stained glass equipment from the family of a former student and wanted to know what would happen to it now.
In a statement, a spokesman for the GSA said: “The glass studio space is being repurposed to accommodate new full-time undergraduate students and studio space for the GSA. Unfortunately at this time there is no alternative space available for either the glass studio or the expansion of student numbers.”
