This research has been an art-based practice-led project focused on Chinese 'inside painting' in glass art. It has attempted to create a 'new model' for Chinese traditional inside painting through the creation of contemporary glass artworks. This is timely because Chinese academic glass teaching is emerging in universities, and cast glass techniques dominate the curriculum. The research offers an example of how traditional methods might be revitalized by one artist to extend the options for Chinese University glass teaching. Potential recipients are glass artists and students as well as curators and collectors. This research mainly used studio-based art practices, inspired by traditional inside painting of Chinese snuff bottles, traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, influenced by Taoism, together with Western glass painting, printing and calligraphy in order to reduce some of the existing limitations of traditional methods. The methods of glass making for this research covered blowing, casting, flame work, fusing, slumping, incorporating 'outside' painting combined with 'inside' painting, and printing combined with inside painting. Traditional inside painting techniques have developed over more than 200 years into a popular form of Chinese folk art, often based on glass snuff bottles with painted decoration on the inside. The craftsmen who make these pieces usually pay more attention to inside painting skills and overlook their own artistic expression. The designs used tend to be repetitive and copies of existing designs from other media such as ink painting or photographs. In this research, a body of inside painted glass works was produced to show how the glass form and painted content were combined. This work also helped to establish possible ways to reduce the limitations of traditional inside painting of Chinese snuff bottles. Contextual aspects were supported by study visits to key collections and conferences, and interviews with other makers and collectors. It is hoped that this research will promote the development of traditional inside painting and lead to inside glass painting developing as a strand of the contemporary Chinese glass arts.

This study reports upon the compositional analysis of early Anglo-Saxon (5th-7th centuries AD) glass beads from the cemetery complex at RAF Lakenheath (Eriswell), Suffolk. Major element analysis was undertaken using energy-dispersive x-ray spectrometry in the scanning electron microscope (SEM-EDS) on 537 samples from a total of 380 monochrome and polychrome beads. Trace element analysis was undertaken by laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LAICP- MS) on 75 different samples from 65 of these beads. SEM-EDS analyses are also reported for a small number of glass beads from the early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries at Spong Hill, Bergh Apton and Morning Thorpe in Norfolk. The beads analysed were produced from soda-lime-silica glass, which was originally made in the Near East from a mixture of a natron and calcareous quartz-rich sand. They have been grouped and compared according to the base glass types represented and their colourant technology. These groups have been systematically compared to a well-established typology and chronology for these beads. The results demonstrate that the Anglo-Saxon glass bead industry was dependent upon the recycling of Roman material during the 5th and 6th centuries, but there is no evidence to suggest continuity in the glass industry from the preceding Roman period. Imported bead types were probably manufactured using a fresh supply of raw glass imported from the Near East. At some point in the latter half of the 6th century there appears to have been a drastic and rapid change in beadmaking practices. The Anglo-Saxon beadmaking industry in England appears to have largely collapsed, except for the production of a few crude bead types produced in the 7th century. Imported bead types come to dominate, but natron glass appears to have been in short supply by this time;