QEST Alumni Showcase the Diversity of British Glass at the 2026 Biennale

A stained glass artist, designer and conservator, Grace Ayson combines traditional glassmaking skills with contemporary design. With extensive experience in the heritage sector, including work on historically significant windows, she creates bespoke stained glass and undertakes restoration, helping to preserve specialist skills while exploring new artistic possibilities. Her work for the Biennale includes Drapery Study in Glass II (Red), which explores how the softness, weight and detail of fabric can be translated into the fragile, rigid medium of flat glass.

Celia Dowson works across ceramics and cast glass, creating objects inspired by the colours, shifting light and atmosphere of the natural world. A QEST Tom Helme Scholar, she explores how material processes can capture movement and a sense of place. Through extensive experimentation with mould-making, colour and translucency, her work invites reflection on the relationship between objects and their surroundings.

Based in the North East of England, Zoe Garner specialises in flameworked glass and explores symmetry, balance, reflection and magnification. Her work draws on scientific ideas and the natural world, using glass to create visual illusions and question how we perceive what is visible and what remains hidden. Her QEST Scholarship supported specialist training in glass lathe work, expanding her technical skills and enabling her to pursue more ambitious projects.

Lulu Harrison is a glass artist and material researcher whose practice explores sustainable, place-specific glassmaking. Combining historical techniques with material science, she experiments with locally sourced and waste materials to develop new glass compositions. She is also this year’s winner of the QEST Sanderson Rising Star Craft Award.

Joanna Manousis is a British-American artist working in glass and mixed media. Her practice explores the contrasting qualities of glass: its transparency and solidity, and its ability to reveal, distort or conceal. Through cast glass and the use of lenses, negative spaces and reflections, her sculptural work draws viewers into a relationship with the object and the space around it.

Guy Marshall-Brown works across glass and ceramics, with an interdisciplinary practice informed by material research and experimentation. His wider work and research explore how materials, processes and ideas can be brought together to create contemporary forms. His selection for the Biennale places his glass practice alongside makers exploring the many technical and conceptual possibilities of the medium.

Michèle Oberdieck is a glass artist and designer whose work explores colour, light and form. Working primarily with blown glass, she creates sculptural vessels inspired by botanical forms and the natural world. She also reinterprets the historic Swedish Graal technique, cutting patterns through layers of coloured glass before reheating and blowing the material again. This process allows the colours and patterns to shift and merge, creating distinctive effects of depth, movement and translucency.

Working in North Wales, Verity Pulford draws inspiration from the natural environment, exploring the intricate structures and growth patterns found in plants, fungi and marine life. Her glass practice combines technical experimentation with close observation of the living world, creating forms that often sit between the familiar and the fantastical. Her work reflects a sustained curiosity about how glass can capture the complexity, fragility and interconnectedness of nature.

Andrea Spencer is a glass artist based on the North Antrim Coast whose practice is rooted in the natural world. Working primarily with flameworked glass and mixed media, she creates delicate sculptural objects and installations inspired by organic structures, marine life and microscopic forms. Her work explores the relationship between fragility and resilience, using the precision of flameworking to interpret the complexity of nature.

Zac Weinberg is a glass artist whose work sits within the diverse field of contemporary glassmaking. His selection for the Biennale reflects the range of approaches represented in the exhibition, bringing his practice into conversation with artists working across established techniques and new directions in the medium.