my week (so far) in sculpture

[kaberett]

Via body_impolitic_feed, specifically the post Ziz[i]pho Poswa's Amazing Art: Poswa's page at Southern Guild, who represent her.


Via Spirals in Time (Helen Scales): Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, due to their glass sea creatures [ Wikipedia | Atlas Obscura ] and thence onward to their Glass Flowers [ Wikipedia | Harvard University Herbaria & Libraries | Harvard Museum of Natural History ].

Both Spirals in Time and Atlas Obscura make the claim (although I am only quoting the latter here, the former wrote something very similar) "A father-and-son team created a menagerie of incredible glass models using mysterious methods." Please imagine, then, my delight at finding, in the Wikipedia entry for the Glass Flowers:

It is often said that the Blaschkas employed secret techniques now lost; in fact their techniques were common at the time, but their skill, enthusiasm, and meticulous study and observation of their subjects in life were extraordinary, which Leopold ascribed to familial tradition, in a letter to Mary Lee Ware: "Many people think that we have some secret apparatus by which we can squeeze glass suddenly into these forms ... The only way to become a glass modeler of skill, I have often said to people, is to get a good great-grandfather who loved glass."

Similarly delightful, again via the same Wikipedia article:

Botanist Donald Schnell has called the models "enchanting", and relates his surprise at finding that the models faithfully depict an unpublished detail of a bee's behavior while pollinating a particular plant—a detail which he had privately hypothesized.

Comments

[ludy]

I saw a few of the glass sea creatures years ago at a temporary exhibition at the Design Museum - they are amazing (and weird but mostly because sea creatures are frequently weird)

[davidgillon]

Oh, wow!

[hairyears]

I'm intrigued: I wonder which bee behaviour they captured.