'Handmade glass looks watery and beautiful'

As anyone who surfs will know, despite the crash, chaos and roar of the ocean, there is a strange moment of peacefulness when you ride a wave. 

- Dreya Bennett , SOPHIE GALE

It's a quality that glass artist Dreya Bennett is somehow able to convey in her sculptures - waves with energy coiled, froth and spray all around; or a shoal of fish thrust along in a swirl of water. The sense of movement is tangible, yet all is captured within a freeze frame. It's hard to describe the feeling of being in the sea,' she says. You take a deep breath and relax, even though the adrenaline is flowing if the surf is big or it's wild and windy.'

Dreya grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, swimming daily in the ocean, before moving to Cornwall aged nine, when her parents acquired a tearoom and village store in St Mawgan.

'I was in the water from the year dot. We'd go straight to the beach from school. Weekends we spent at the creek. I wasn't scared of stuff, I would dive in.'

One Christmas during her twenties, Dreya stumbled across an application form for the TV series Gladiators at her parents' business, and filled it in on a whim. A round of interviews and a fitness test later, and she found herself winning battles in the arena against Rio, Rebel and friends. Back in Cornwall, 'Dreya the Slayer', as friends dubbed her, alighted on a new passion - kitesurfing. This exhilarating sport, then in its infancy, is a combination of surfing and power kiting. More than the sum of its parts, it facilitates jumps and tricks tens of feet up in the air.

Dreya teamed up with Henry Ashworth, owner of the Watergate Bay Hotel, to set up the UK's first kitesurfing school. A few years later, she rode by board and kite from Watergate Bay to Ireland, scooping a world record for the nine-hour journey; husband Layton, a photographer, tagging along by boat. It's a completely different world out there. It can be busier than you imagine with big boats and tankers; and so many dolphins. But for long stretches, it was just us. The colours are amazing, nothing like the shallows of the shore, but a moodier, stormier blue.'