Anselm Croze: Glassmaker and Dream Merchant

Anselm Croze presides over an enchanted kingdom: the hot glass division of Kitengela Glassworks. At Kitengela, Anselm combines his passion for the environment with his passion for glass art; he places his art in his environment with the same creative joy with which he weaves the environment into his art. Many Kenyan homes have some of Kitengela’s luminous hand-crafted glasses, vases, platters, and bowls in shades ranging from deepest blue and emerald green to delicate pastels the colour of illuminated water from the sea. All are created from 100% recycled, reclaimed, and salvaged materials. A lucky few are able to make the trek out to the busy hive of activity that is the source of the art.

Today Anselm holds up a rod of glass and moves it from side to side, looking at the play of refraction and radiance. “Look,” he says. “It’s light standing still. Frozen fire.” He can not see that his blue eyes too glow with pulsing luminosity, that they are alive with the glittering dreaming light common to prophets, visionaries and madmen. His fascination with making glass stems from its alchemical production: the magical fusion of science, art, engineering and form, of heat and light, water and fantasy. “Bush Glass,” he calls it.

Anselm speaks with fierce pride of the “Kenyan Jua Kali ethos,” and its force is strong within him. He likes “making things from stuff around”; he gets his inspiration for his art from more “stuff around”— planetary bodies and motions, and molecules, and mountains and hills and flowing landscapes. Indeed, he specifically likes old objects: things that are able to hold their use-value through many lives and many incarnations, things with history and innovation embedded into them. His recycled and heartbreakingly beautiful glass is like that: redolent with other lives, other contexts, past forms and future uses.

Anselm is planning no less than a revolution: an African hot-glass movement in which handcrafted glass from every region across the continent, complete with regional specializations and signature colours, will present itself to the world as another indicator of Africa’s global-level creativity, another way in which African cultural production continues to innovate, re-imagining and renewing itself.

The way to the workshop is over rutted roads with more craters than the moon and through wafting billows of dust. That certain features of the landscape are not geological formations takes a while to notice. The visitor’s eye wanders over the seductively wide horizons of the Kitengela plains and then zooms back to a strange mound in the middle of the openness. This large, deep-red brick dome surrounded by hardy scrubland and herds of incurious cattle and cavorting baboons is, improbably, Anselm Croze’s workshop. Around this mound, which looks like nothing so much as a fantastical out-sized egg mysteriously parked on the savannah, Anselm has created a mythical landscape populated by beguilingly oversized and unexpected forms. His sometimes disturbing artwork is out in the open, harmonizing surprisingly with the grass and rocky outgrowths and trees. His is not the only artwork on display, because he believes in artistic collaboration and engages in many joint projects with other artists. But his is certainly the animating spirit behind the exuberance and the rigour of the art.

There is, for instance, the corpse of a car upended on its bonnet. A few seconds after processing the improbability of an accident (there’s nothing to hit) that would cause a car to stand on its nose like that, the viewer notices a curiously immobile elephant rendered in wire and a fifteen- foot moran gazing imperturbably over the dusty grasslands. There are camels too—real ones, and others done in metal and shards of glass—along with suns and cacti constructed in glittering, glimmering shards of light and ensorcelled stone. Behind the cluster of buildings that houses the glassworks, astonished visitors will discover the Necklace Bridge—an absurdly fragile-looking contraption of wire and beads swaying precariously over the muddy brown waters at the bottom of a very deep gorge. The idea that this intensely beautiful weaving of beaded metal strands is sturdy enough to support a person’s weight above all of that deep nothingness is alarming.

Inside the dome, groups of men in protective overalls with old socks on their hands toil and sweat surrounded by roaring furnaces and bubbling glass. The men wield curious long-handled metal pipes with dexterity and controlled haste. These they sometimes plunge, twisting, into the hearts of the fires roaring around them before sitting to twirl and pad the glass into shape ,or dunking them in the buckets of cold water next to their workstations. The workshop sounds like a living thing, with water hissing, fires crackling, and the footsteps of the glassworkers syncopating as they wield their long pipes, tipped with glowing bulbs of molten glass, like fiery dreams waiting to be imagined into life. Work proceeds like a strange and dangerous ballet: The fires are very hot, the space is not very big, and the glass must be shaped before it cools—which happens very quickly with recycled glass. The men move with an eerie awareness of each other—their metal rods swinging through the dark interior like fireflies bobbing in the evening light. Anselm Croze weaves through this space uttering sharp “Now!” directives, stooping to take up a tool and correct a shape himself, murmuring, encouraging, experimenting, and innovating along with his skilled team. Every now and then, they break into resigned laughter when a technique goes horribly wrong. And then they try it again. And again, until they get it right and effortless, until they are almost dancing through their work.

Anselm Croze was born in Cumbria in northern England. He came to Kenya with his father, Harvey Croze, an environmental zoologist who worked in the Serengeti. Anselm remembers home-schooling in a tent in Tanzania; later, he was the one little mzungu kid amongst many black urchins in a small, one-room rural school, running around, getting into dirt and trouble. Later still, he drove a taxi around Ann Arbor, Michigan, because he had run out of money to pay his university fees in the U.S.A. He understands hardship quite well, and he understands the value of practical methods of showing solidarity. Kitengela Glassworks supports the Bosco Boys Home (where Anselm recruits many of his glassmaking trainees), as well as the local high school, with material and financial support. More importantly, Anselm Croze is intent on passing on his skills and his love of glass and making beauty to as many Kenyans as possible; given the abundant evidence in his Kitengela Hot Glass retail outlets, this is a skill that is economically beneficial as well as soul satisfying. For his environmental passion and his rigorous and joyful aesthetic production, for his capacity to make dreams tangible and touchable (and useful), for his relentless creativity and innovation in found objects and Kenyan material culture, GenerationKenya is proud to claim Anselm Croze amongst our panel of jurors.

Anselm Croze: glassmaster, dreamweaver and GenerationKenya juror.