Svea Berling
Born in Bremen, Germany in 1973 I moved to New Zealand with my family in the late 80s and have lived here (bar a brief stint in the UK) ever since. Having gone to university in Auckland I became an English and Media teacher but never went back after having had children. Nowadays I live with my partner in Torbay and together we run our regenerative landscaping company ‘Untangled Landscapes’ whilst I moonlight as a glass artist and also run my fused glass moulds, workshops & art company ‘Glass Obsession.’
I come from a family of architects and toy makers and I blame this genetic material for my entirely all-encompassing obsession with everything glass and a need to express myself in a creative fashion. The landscaping satisfies a part of this but ever since having had a significant accident some years ago I am very much part time in that area and the glass has become a major creative outlet in its stead. From a very young age until this present day I have always collected coloured glass, arranging it in pleasing groupings and driving my kids to distraction as they feel that all this glass everywhere is an earthquake hazard. When I discovered the world of glass fusing, a natural extension of my mosaic work, an entire universe of prisms suddenly made itself available to me and it quickly became a major pastime. There are infinite possibilities of colour, shape and texture. Glass is magic, neither a solid nor a liquid but a combination of the two. Alchemy! Nowadays I aim to spend more and more time in my glass studio 'The Alchemist' in Torbay, Auckland from where I teach glass fusing workshops whilst simultaneously continuing to explore this medium. I am particularly in love with the Effetre glass from the island of Murano, Venice Italy, also known as Murano or Moretti glass. Typically used for beadmaking I enjoy exploring the colour, shape and texture of this beautiful soft and colour-saturated glass to create jewellery and small decorative items and dishes, with a particular focus on the use of millefiori, literally translated to mean 'thousands of flowers.' I remember first coming across this glass when visiting Venice in the early 2000s and found the fields of flowers embedded in the glass quite mesmerising. Someone pointed out to me that my work with millefiori has a distinct mosaic feel and I guess that is spot on, it's the creating with these little glass flower gems that never seems to get boring. The retailing of fused glass art moulds was borne out of necessity, turns out that there is a woeful lack of supply especially in New Zealand and even Australia, and buying one or two moulds (or ‘molds’ in America) from the States or Europe is an exorbitant and time consuming process. www.glassobsession.co.nz is the product of a need for moulds, the joy of teaching creative processes and the resulting glass art itself. All three of these can be purchased from the Glass Obsession website 🙂 I relish a challenge and am always happy to do commission work (fused glass and mosaic pieces), as well as fusing with cremains so please reach out to me at [email protected], find me on facebook https://www.facebook.com/glassobsession, whatsapp/text 021783223 or snag one of my business cards. |