Mike McGregor

Artist Profile

Artist Profile

Mike McGregor was born in Whakatane in 1963, graduated with a diploma in applied art from the Northland polytechnic in 1990, then spent three years working in glass-blowing workshop in London while also working as an assistant to English glass artist Patrick Stern. "He taught me a lot," Mike says "particularly in the way he used the material. I see things in my work today that I would directly credit to Patrick - things like my thick bodied dishes. He used the index of refraction well, creating effects from the use of thin and thick sections of glass. His was a Scandinavian look - clean and simple not to fancy.
In 1995 Mike helped Keith Mahy build the Burning Issues studio and gallery, and he worked there part-time for eighteen months. He and his family then moved to Auckland so his wife could return to full-time work. "I quit glass blowing to spend the next three years at home with my preschool daughter, Daisy," Mike says.
In 1999 he began to work weekends blowing glass for Garry Nash and in 2000, then a solo father, he returned to Whangarei and began to work three days a week for Keith Mahy. He now blows glass five days a fortnight and hires the workshop every second weekend to make his own work.Mike likes to make loose, fluid works, but also enjoys the discipline of making tight controlled pieces. He makes canes and uses them in an Italian way, laying them out in rows on a metal plate, then fusing them together in the glory hole so they look a bit like a sushi mat. He rolls the vertical pieces up into a cylinder of vertical canes, then twists it and closes off the end to create a bubble made entirely of cane. After gathering a layer of glass over the top he then blows it into a vessel.He also makes dramatic three-coloured bowls. These may look simple, but the process of making them is not. He first makes a small cup of one colour, and puts a lip wrap on it. The next day he puts it into a small kiln and brings it up to annealing temperature. He picks up some coloured glass on a blowing pipe, folds another colour over it then takes a couple of gathers of clear glass over the top of that. This longer shape is then dropped into a cup he has waiting in the kiln, which will come about halfway up it. He heats and shapes the whole piece, blows it up, transfers it on a pontil rod, and opens it out into a bowl, which ends up with one colour on the bottom, a different colour on the top half and another colour on the inside.
Mike would like one day a week to build a studio at home and concentrate on making his own work full-time, but he says the cost of setting up and running his own furnace are prohibitive at this stage. "Since Daisy's birth in 1995, caring for her has been my first priority. Glassblowing has to fit around that. Even now, when she is ten years old, I limit my working day to five hours so I am there and after school for her. This keeps me poor and my work in relative obscurity, but allows me to do a good job of raising my daughter. "