Featured work by Louis Sidoli

I never considered pursuing a career as an artist, even though I come from an Anglo - Italian family, most of whom are artists or designers. Art was my best subject at school and I won many local and national art competitions. When I came to leave school, I didn't really have a clue about what I wanted to do for a career. Due to the fact I was good at sciences, I ended up studied engineering and embarked on a career in car design and engineering for 15 years. In some ways I had my 'dream job', because I love cars and worked on new product concepts for some of the best brands in the world. However, I always had a strong feeling that this wasn't my path in life and that I should be doing something more creative - but I didn't know what.

I've always been interested in music and enjoyed playing keyboards and guitar for quite a few years. At one stage I considered the idea of working in the music industry as a studio engineer or producer, which would combine my creative skills with my technical skills. But I felt trapped by the status of a good job. I couldn't face the idea of re-training and starting all over again from scratch in a new career, with little or no money to pay the bills.

In 1999, I was introduced to glass making through a friend. I felt really inspired and bought a small test kiln, which I installed in a spare room and started to experiment with, learning the necessary skills from books and information on the Internet. At the time, there were only a few kiln-fused glass artists in the UK and it was a very niche process. It took lots of research to source the necessary tools and materials from various companies based all over the world.

I seemed to have a natural ability to make glass and decided to take a risk and leave my job to set up a glass design business. I realised that there was a huge commercial opportunity to use the process to produce contemporary glass wall tiles, which were not widely available in the UK at the time. Although there were a few raised eyebrows, my decision paid off. Within a year my start up business was booming. I had set up a workshop and was supplying major high street retail chains with my glass tile designs for bathrooms and kitchens.

A few years later, I became interested in art as a result of looking around galleries to find art for my own home. I found it difficult to find things that I liked, so I experimented by making a few pieces myself. My concept was to mount hand made glass tiles onto frames to create contemporary art. Although my first pieces were fairly crude, the reaction was positive and I decided I wanted to pursue it further. I also wanted to make better use of my creative and glass making skills. Designing wall tiles is quite limiting and customers tend to like very simple conservative designs in their bathrooms and kitchens.

By 2005 I had converted an old stable / garage at the back of my house into my own home studio, to enable me to work more flexibly at my own pace and without the pressure of leasing expensive commercial premises. I then spent almost two years developing my creative ideas and testing the reaction with a number of local galleries and art fairs before finally launching my first collection of art in February 2007. The reaction to it so far has been fantastic.