His work directly confronts the history of the Harewood estate. ‘I don’t think you really can come to terms with the fact that all this extraordinary beauty at Harewood comes out of such brutality,’ says Hannah Obee, Harewood’s director of collections, programme and learning. In her view, Day’s work may create discomfort but it’s there to ‘encourage discussion, to bring people together’.
Day’s work draws on his own experiences of growing up mixed race on a predominantly white council estate in Derby. ‘I have used my craft to navigate what it means to be Black in the UK – and also white,’ he says. Having left school at 16, he had a successful career as a plumbing and heating engineer before deciding, at the age of 47, to realise a long-held dream and retrain as an artist. He enrolled at Wolverhampton School of Art in 2016, where he did a BA in Glass and Ceramics, and has just completed an MA in Design and Applied Arts. In the course of researching for his BA, he started to look into the history of the transatlantic slave trade, and of racial segregation in the US, and felt compelled to respond. ‘Every time I tried to research something, about the civil rights movement or segregation… it all related back to slavery.’ Art became a way for him to grapple with his feelings of being an ‘outsider’. For example, his early work Imposter Syndrome uses the motif of an ethereal glass bubble struggling to escape from a rusty cage as a metaphor for his uncertainty about who he was. He was drawn to glass because it seemed alive: ‘It wants to escape from you, and you’ve got to hone it and caress it into what you want.’
As a maker, Day translates the feeling for materials that he gained through being a plumber into a distinctive language. To create his rum bottles, for example, he begins by winding a length of copper microbore, a material used in plumbing, around a cylindrical shape such as a paint pot into a coil – he calls it a ‘slinky’. To preserve the coil’s shape and prevent it from collapsing under the weight of the glass, he binds it crosswise with electrical wire, and places it inside a galvanised steel bucket as an outer shell. He then melts a gather of glass from colour sticks. After blowing a small bubble, he dips it in a cauldron of transparent glass, as if ‘gathering syrup on a spoon’. He then inflates the bubble further and, with the aid of an assistant, trails lines of molten blue glass across its surface. Only at this stage can he lift the heavy, sagging, red-hot ball, which he has to keep he lift the heavy, sagging, red-hot ball, which he has to keep turning to preserve the shape, into the copper cage and blow it outwards. Making such works is an intense process on many levels, mentally and physically.