Glass Works

Taking Roots Through Training and Networking

About Glass Works

Glass Works is a four-year pilot project in the Creative Europe programe of the European Union and, amongst others, is funded by the Bavarian ministry of Finances and Homeland.

Glass Works Creates Future: Start-up-trainings support young glassmakers in the arts, crafts and design to find their own professional paths and take roots in the European glass community.

Glass Works Creates Networks: The Glass Works network brings together glassmakers and manufacturers, studios, schools and regional management. Conferences, symposia and workshop events bring European glass regions and glassmakers into conversation.

Glass Works Creates Knowledge: Following in the footsteps of the traveling glass people between Eastern Bavaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Alsace-Lorraine and Styria, a touring exhibition explores the cross-border future potential of glass.

GLASS WORKS IS INNOVATIVE HERITAGE: The experience of the Glass Works pilot project is the basis on which we are planning the future of Glass Works: From Frauenau, in cooperation with partners in Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, Austria and France, artists, craftsmen and designers will continue to design and market glass together, exchange ideas and develop new ideas after 2022. We are building the future in glass.

“It is a pan European project with a clear added value for an economy sector that needs to be reactivated in a structured and innovative way. […] The project is focused on the urgent need to find new ways to reconnect the creativity of artist makers with the complex know-how of industrial craftspeople and manufacturers and new markets.”

Excerpt from the Evaluation report by the EU about the project

The Future in Glass

“The Future in Glass” was created as part of the traveling exhibition “European Glass Lives in Craft, Art and Industry” and allows different players in the European glass landscape to have their say. They reflect on the future of glassmakers in craft, through collaboration, and in a globalized world.

I think it is important for any crafts based productive system not to fall asleep and go out, - it must be revisited daily [...]. What is also important is that [...] historians, design theorists, artists, glassmakers, politicians [...] come together and think in a back and forth crossed way, a mixed way, to combine ideas, and this is where innovation is born. Innovation does not come from ultra specialisation, but from the ability to work transversally. And that, I think, could be good for a lot of artisanal systems.

Yann Grienenberger, International Glass Art Centre (CIAV) Meisenthal, F