Glass is one of those things that inspires
more cliches than you can imagine.
It's has a life of its own.
It's true, it does. Basically glass won't do all the time
what you want it to do, it's hynoptic,
because it's fluid and plastic, and yet
it immediately goes from butter to toffee
to cardboard to stone, and becomes rigid.
You have to treat it really carefully.
So when Mary came to talk about the project in September,
she unfolded the whole concept that she had
for her 'New Dawn' sculpture, and she showed me
some of the research she'd been doing into women's suffrage,
particularly the images of the scrolls in the Act Room,
which I found really fascinating.
Those images really resonated with me.
We started talking about how we could
actually bring those into the sculpture.
The glass-blowing process starts off by taking
a piece of solid rod colour, cutting it, and placing it
into a kiln, and bringing it up to 525 degrees.
So these are powdered glass colours.
I'm just laying this out on a steel table.
This is actually quite enjoyable and therapeutic,
it's a little bit like painting.
You've got to bear in mind that although these colours
look a certain way, some of them are opals,
and some of them are transparent, so they won't
actually turn out quite the same way
as they look on the finished piece.
Then you pre-heat a blowing iron, and pick that piece
of colour up, and re-heat it in the glory hole
so that it becomes fluid.
Then you roll it on a steel table to chill
the outside, and introduce air by blowing down the iron.
There's a set-up here that really
hasn't changed very much for 2000 years.
A Roman glass-maker would probably recognise
what you see on this bench.
At that stage, you then shape it,
and as it cools down sufficiently,
you gather another layer of clear glass
over the surface, and take it back to the bench.
Cool it on the outside with a wooden block,
shape it with a pad of wet newspaper by hand,
and start to inflate it.
To make a larger piece, you then get another gather
of clear glass, and go through that stage again.
The next stage is to blow the bubble up and shape it.
You then cover it with silver leaf, which is easier said
than done, because the glass at this stage
is somewhere around about 500 degrees.
Once you've done that, you re-heat that again
and roll it in the powdered glass colours
that are laid out on the steel table.
Re-heat again to melt those colours into the surface,
and ask your assistant to bring you a punty iron,
or finishing iron, and join that punty iron onto the base,
and chill the neck, tap the iron, and it should transfer
from the blowing iron onto the finishing iron.
At this stage, you have to think
about opening it out into the required shape.
You gradually open up the rim.
Get the piece very very hot,
and start spinning it out into a plate.
It's dead simple when you know how.
So that's the end of the process.
Now we've only got another 167 to make.
I've never glass-blown before, I have to say.
I've seen it and of course, a good glass-blower
makes it look really easy.
Having a go yourself makes you realise it's not easy at all.
I want to have something which inspires 14-year-old girls
when they walk round Parliament, and they see all these men,
and all these statues, and they think
where's my place in this.
I want them to know that they have a place.
-The whole movement and the whole idea
of Parliament slowly getting in behind,
it's too slow but we're getting there,
and today was a great encouragement.
I think it's spectacular enough to make quite a difference,
and people are really going to come and see it and ask.
That's what we want.
Oh, it's very important, because history's made
of memories, and that's why I think, to mark it
in the House of Commons particularly,
given the enormous journey we've made
over such a short distance...
..I'm glad that we're doing this, and it will be beautiful,
as a piece of art, but also meaningful
because it commemorates something important.