The Exhibition

Series History and Descriptions

Boats

Chihuly first filled boats with glass in Nuutajärvi , Finland , during the Chihuly Over Venice project in 1995. After several days of glassblowing, Chihuly and the team made temporary installations along the Nuutajoki, the river nearby. He often tossed glass into the river, letting it float downstream. Local children in small wooden rowing boats gathered them, and it was probably then that Chihuly saw the opportunity for a new type of installation. When the team found a partially submerged wooden rowing boat, which was hauled out and emptied of mud and debris, Chihuly filled it to overflowing with glass. He has continued to revisit the Boat idea ever since.

Chandeliers

‘What makes the chandeliers work for me is the massing of colour. If you take up to thousands of blown pieces of one colour, put them together, and then shoot light through them, now that's going to be something to look at. Now you hang it in space and it becomes mysterious, defying gravity or seemingly out of place. Something you have never seen before.’ Dale Chihuly

Niijima Floats

On the tiny island of Niijima , Japan , Osamu and Yumiko Noda, former students at Pilchuck, created a glass school perched on a cliff looking out to sea. It was there in 1991 that Chihuly started this series. Named for both the island and the traditional Japanese fishing floats, his Floats reminded him of the oceans and the ocean’s currents.

‘I've never done anything like the Floats. They are probably the most monumental-looking, since there's no reminiscence of a container shape. Just because they are so big, the Floats are technically, or let's say physically, the most difficult things that we have ever done. Even though a sphere or a ball is about the easiest form you can make in glass, when you get to this scale, up to forty inches in diameter, it becomes extremely difficult.’ Dale Chihuly

Reeds

‘In Finland we started making these long, cylindrical pieces that looked like spears. This was an exciting new form. It was the first time we ever made anything like that. Sometimes I call them Spears and sometimes I call them Reeds. They can be taken anywhere—they can go outside. They are very strong pieces, and they are very dramatic.’ Dale Chihuly

Chihuly made the first Reeds in Finland in 1995 at the Hackman factory in Nuutajarvi, a small glassblowing town. Unlike other factories, at Hackman there were very high ceilings. To make the Reeds one glassblower holding the gather of glass on the blowpipe climbs into a mechanical lift and blows into the glass while another person on the ground pulls it from below. Some Reeds are longer than 10 feet.

Herons

The Herons are another form that came from Chihuly’s experimentation with blowing different shapes and using new techniques in Finland . After making the Reeds, he continued to push his team to try new things with the elongated tube form. After many days, they made pieces that looked to them like herons, the wading birds found along shorelines and lakes. Chihuly often names his glass parts after words he uses with his glassblowers as they attempt to describe the shapes they created through experimentation.

Macchia

‘The Macchia series began with my waking up one day wanting to use all 300 of the colours in the hotshop. I started by making up a colour chart with one colour for the interior, another colour for the exterior, and a contrasting colour for the lip wrap, along with various jimmies and dusts of pigment between the gathers of the glass. Throughout the blowing process, colours were added, layer upon layer. Each piece was another experiment. When we unloaded the ovens in the morning, there was the rush of seeing something I had never seen before. Like much of my work, the series inspired itself. The unbelievable combinations of colour – that was the driving force.’ Dale Chihuly.

The name Macchia (pronounced mock’kia) comes from the Italian word for ‘spotted’. Chihuly couldn’t think what to call this series of works when he began them in 1981, so he called an artist friend, Italo Scanga, and because of their design he asked what the Italian word for ‘spotted’ would be.

Persians

‘The Persians started out as a search for new forms. I set up Martin Blank and Robbie Miller in a corner of the hotshop at Pilchuck. I would make large pencil drawings for them with a couple of dozen small forms, and then I would put an X under the ones I wanted them to go for. Over the next year, we made more than 1,000 miniature experimental forms.’ Dale Chihuly

Chihuly made his first Persians in 1998. He started making rather small forms, but these grew over time to large pieces including some room-size installations. The title Persians hints at associations with early glass styles, and reflects the fusion of Eastern and Western styles. Chihuly’s awareness of these historical ties and the assimilation of Persian, Byzantine and eastern stylistic influences in Venetian art grew during his time at the Venini factory in Venice.

Ikebana

‘I took my Venetians and added long-stemmed flowers and leaves, which evolved into my Ikebana series. I started calling them Ikebana partly because I had just been to Japan . The quintessential Ikebana would be a base piece with a long stem coming out of it, perhaps two or three stems. And it might be six feet high.’ Dale Chihuly.

In the late 1980s, the Venetian glass maestros Lino Tagliapietra and Pino Signoretto taught at the Pilchuck Glass School and worked with Chihuly in his hotshop. Their skill in manipulating hot glass was a revelation to the Americans, and Chihuly’s glassblowing team developed a new level of proficiency. In 1989, Chihuly travelled in Japan , and returned to this more adept glassblowing team, leading them in making elongated, stylised flowers and stems that recalled the Japanese art of flower arranging, or Ikebana.

‘Chihuly grew up surrounded by flowers. His mother has a passion for gardening… It is not too surprising that Chihuly has periodically turned to floral motifs… To embellish his Venetians and complement and emphasise their larger scale, Chihuly created a series of elongated stems and blossoms, called Ikebana, after the stylised beauty of Japanese floral arrangements and reminiscent of the carved wood, gild lotus blossoms that he admired on visits to Buddhist temples in Japan.’ [Bannard and Geldzahler 73]

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