Ruth Shelley

Award winning artist Ruth Shelley specialises in contemporary glass design. She initially studied Textiles, before her love of colour took her to experiment with glass and it's there that she has found her true passion as soon as she touched glass she fell in love with it.

With a hugely impressive CV, Ruth won the Glass Sellers Award at the British Glass Biennale in 2015 and has studied Masterclasses with some of the world's top glassmakers, Sylvia Levenson, Steve Klein and Nathan Sandberg in the UK and USA.

Ruth currently works from her studio in Cardiff where she produces a variety of kiln formed objects from Warm Glass. Her pieces are characteristically bright, using an array of vivid tones.

Ruth's inspirations come from her love of travel and the natural world and she constantly observes and documents the colours and combinations of colours she sees on her trips, to produce a body of works back at her studio. She will often visit a location over and over again to watch it at different times of the day, in different weathers and at different times of the year, to see how the colours of the landscape change.

Ruth continually experiments and pushes the limits of glass, scrutinising how the colours and layers combine as a whole. Her designs continually evolve as she makes each piece, working to fit all of the fragments of glass together like a jigsaw and create her vision. She also likes to combine opaque and transparent glass together in her designs to allow the light to shine through her pieces bringing them to life.