In Conversation with Rock & Soar

Reading time: 6 minutes

Founded last year, Rock & Soar have established themselves as some of the most cutting-edge designers in sculptural lighting, working with Blowfish Glass UK on two exciting installations. On their first anniversary, Leanne O’Connor catches up with Artistic Director Alison Smith to learn more…

I was just wondering how Rock & Soar was founded?

Rock & Soar was founded last year. So, it’s coming up to our first birthday, which is the 25th of May—founded by myself and Monica Polonio. We met when we both worked for a lighting company; we both liked each other’s ideas, so we decided to take the leap and start ourselves. Monica works in sales and business development, and I do the creative and design aspects.

We specialise in suspended sculptural artworks and decorative objects which celebrate nature, energy, and balance within their creations. The designs beautifully involve hand-made, unique components that celebrate craftsmanship, process and materials.

We also hire freelance product engineers to do all the hard parts, like visualizing our concepts and testing the viability of designs.

What led you to start working with glass in your suspended installations?

I have always been an arty person. I spend most of my time doing lots of drawing and painting from nature. I’ll use that for my initial designs. And then, I studied 3D design craft in college. I moved on to university, where I did a BA in decorative arts, which is getting your hands on many different crafts.

We did some resin, glass, ceramics, jewellery, and wood. So, those materials emerge in Rock & Soar’s styles and designs.

I decided to specialise in glass, but it was like kiln-formed. I ended up working with Anthony Wassell at Nottingham Trent Uni for my final degree show work.

I think he was based in Matlock, and he ended up bringing my designs to life. This is how I met Beth from Blowfish Glass UK, and then we caught up with New Designers, as we were both nominated for the Glass Prize, we exchanged Instagrams, and the rest is history.

I sit on the edge of glass as I can’t specialise in just one material; I like to explore all techniques and processes. But we are also excited to expand into ceramics soon

What does the creative process look like when you work with craftspeople?

We’ve worked with Blowfish Glass UK on two projects ‘Storm’ and soon to be launched ‘Fracture’; we got the ball rolling by sending a brief over, and that brief will contain all my colourways taken from my watercolours and sketches. My previous glass-blowing experience really helps because I was a glass-blowing assistant for a short period, and then I’ve always been in the workshop looking at people demonstrating and asking questions.

My technical awareness of it helps these guys when I’m designing my sketches. When these are completed, I send them to Beth and Elliot so they can produce and do some prototyping and then check the feasibility of it.

What inspires these initial sketches?

The original kind of concept or genre is nature, and it is very kind of free-flowing, which is also the nature of glass blowing as well, isn’t it?

I will pick a particular thing that I’m drawn to, whether it’s stormy skies or the changing state of water, or it could be like an oak leaf or a pinecone or something like that.

The thing that I love and probably will develop more of because it is starting to be Rock & Soar’s style is the idea of the watercolours being able to flow through the page and the painting and then how well that translates into like ‘storm’, for example. With the watercolours appearing to be in the glass. Yeah. I love that analogy of it.

Tell me more about the upcoming work ‘Fracture’, is this connected to our previous work ‘Storm’?

‘Fracture’ is quite different to ‘Storm’, especially with the fact that it includes components which are smashed up and sharp. In contrast to Storm, which has a softer appearance, alike to rain clouds.

Storm dupes you from a distance that it isn’t made of glass, whereas ‘Fracture’ is built to look sharp. It is inspired by how ice forms and is supposed to describe the changes of state in water.

You have like ice and fractures and solid, and then you’ve got the main body which is very fluid and smooth, and then it’s a juxtaposition of bringing those two together, and I never really thought of it as the same way as glass and the changes of state in glass as well.

I usually don’t connect works, as I am enticed by a specific fragment of nature, which I then ask myself questions about the textures and forms, which leads me down a process of negotiating form.

You use CGI to develop your designs, which connects to the AI boom we are now experiencing. Can you tell me more about how you navigate this technology?

I think it is a very useful tool in terms of especially when we were starting, because it costs so much money to be able to create the designs that we do; we must find a more cost-effective way of being able to show people what they can look like and how we can make them.

We work with a visualiser to be able to produce from my sketches as well; it happens in tandem with the glass-blowing aspect and any tweaks that need to be made after the glass-blowing prototype is created, it might be that the colour is a little bit off or something like that, but it’s pretty much quite dead on.

We utilise this technology at the very initial stages. Then we use that as a guideline, and then once we have, like, say, ‘Storm‘ installed in a showroom, we can then photograph that in real life and show clients and then they can get an understanding of the realism of it as well, but they always have been very, very much the same.

I would love to be able to create some sort of animation, eventually or short, around the models rendered in the CGI because everyone’s now transitioning into reel video content, which is much more eye-catching marketing.

Do you have a dream project or location for any of your work?

I’ve always thought like if I was to build my own house, what would it be? And all I know is lots of windows and natural light and being a double height space and having a massive lighting installation in the middle.

It would be in glass, and I think I’ve done some really nice work with encapsulating glass pieces in Resin (pictured at top of page), so I would love to take this idea forward. It was a very similar structure, but it was casting shards into acrylic and a meeting of materials. And, it works well in terms of the form being solid and light passing through and refracting.

What’s in store for the future of Rock & Soar?

There’s another side of the business, which is called ‘Objects’ that we haven’t pushed forward yet, which could stand alone but also work well as objects or vessels that work in tandem with installations so that if an interior designer wants the sculptural installation within their interior scheme, they can also have objects or vessels to compliment the overall design.

Stay tuned for more updates as Rock & Soar launches ‘Fracture’, a new collaboration with Blowfish Glass.

You can view the brochure for ‘Storm’ via this link: https://www.rockandsoar.com/_files/ugd/6c53d3_fd96fde1ff4741bf9bb7f7fd71be1d9d.pdf

You can wish Rock & Soar happy birthday on Instagram via this link: https://www.instagram.com/rockandsoar/?hl=en

Written by

Leanne O’Connor

Blowfish Glass UK ©