Stained glass swimmers

Artist and outdoor swimmer Charlotte Savill starts 2024 in a promising position after featuring in BBC1’s Make it at Market television series. Her work is inspired by wild swims and her own outdoor synchronised swimming. Ella Foote finds out more.

A week after Charlotte Savill features in BBC1’s Make it at Market series she is overwhelmed with interest in her swimming inspired stained glass artwork. Her online shop sold out in 90 minutes, she received 12,000 pre-orders and 12,000 commissions. “It’s totally bonkers,” says Charlotte. “All of my pieces are one-offs and every one of them unique, so it is very difficult to make my work in batches. It is a great problem to have but daunting too.”

The BBC series, Make it at Market, pairs-up professional makers with amateur crafters to help turn their hobbies and skills into serious money and life-changing businesses. Charlotte has been a life-long maker and confesses to being a compulsive crafter on the programme, but it is only recently that she has made it a career priority. “My career has been a bit wibbly, wobbly,” she says. “I graduated from university with a fine art degree specialising in sculpture and tried to make it as an artist before giving it up to travel. After that I did lots of jobs, some of them strange, like a retrieve driver for the Hand Gliding Association. I taught English in India before I ended up at a university as a counsellor, then gave up work to have my children before ending up working at a vets practice.”

Despite the ‘wibbly wobbly’ career, Charlotte has consistently been creative. Five years ago she took a one-day course in stained glass and her interest progressed from there. “I started teaching myself using YouTube and Instagram, developing my own ideas,” says Charlotte. “I worked quietly because I wasn’t confident enough to put my work out there, giving it away as presents. My Mum had loads of my stuff and it was then I thought, I need to suck it up and find some confidence.”

In 2020, like many, Charlotte found herself at the water. “I have always been a water baby, swimming has always been a part of my life,” says Charlotte. “When my Mum died, I started swimming every day, a lot of people did that year because of the pandemic, I used it as a way of healing. The water became my sacred place. I recently brought a kiln and started painting glass which has meant working in churches. I have started painting church windows and light vessels, through this work I was reminded of faith and a place that is sacred to many. It reminded me of the swimming community and the feeling you get when you’re swimming and the people you meet.”

Being Bristol based, Charlotte is fortunate to be a member of Henleaze Swimming Club. “It is so incredible, it has become my church,” she says. “It is a place where I can go and sometimes not talk to anyone and at other times be chatty and spend four-five hours there. It is also where I do synchronised swimming, which is a huge inspiration for me. I take a lot of photos of my fellow synchro team and then use them in my stained-glass work. I love it, but if someone had said to me five years ago that one day, I would be making up dances in someone’s kitchen and then taking to the water, I would have thought them crazy!”

As well as developing as a swimmer, the water has inspired a whole collection of work. The stained-glass work features individual swimmers, synchro swimmers, swimming men and lido loops, which are glass drawings. It is an expensive hobby with the cost of materials increasing like many other things. “One of the best things about being part of the BBC show was learning more about pricing and valuing my work,” says Charlotte. “Knowing your worth is a very difficult thing and you have to break-down every single material that goes into one piece as well as how much time it took to make.”

Charlotte applied for the BBC show in March this year after seeing an advert where she buys her glass. The producers of the show were particularly interested in stained glass artists because it has been identified as an endangered craft by the Heritage Crafts. “Stained glass is in decline and so it is great they have identified it as a craft that needs a boost,” says Charlotte. “I found out I was successful and selected for the show while I was volunteering at Glastonbury Festival. It is a fantastic series; this is the second one. I got paired with stained glass artist Derek Hunt, which was exciting.”

“Derek is such a fountain of knowledge he has pushed me into a direction I didn’t think I was ready for and has really accelerated my work.” In Charlotte’s episode you get to watch her create and understand the work that goes into each piece. “There are 30 makers altogether with all different skills and talents, we are all connected now and support each other. It has been such a boost for my business, but most of all my confidence.”

Charlotte features in episode 7, series 2 of Make it at Market. You can find it on BBCiPlayer. To see her work visit leadlightstudio.co.uk