This was the first picture I took in the Chihuly Garden & Glass exhibit at the Seattle Center. The darn display haunted me throughout the rest of the tour. I could not stop thinking about how these shapes were formed- the idea just kept hammering at my brain and I had a hard time focusing on anything else!
How did they do that? Chihuly stands on a ladder and blows molten white glass onto the concrete floor below while an assistant lets it puddle and helps it branch. As they work with it, it cools pretty quickly and thus you have pools of glass with "stems" as it were, reaching to the sky even as they direct your eye to the ground. Like trees with exposed gnarled roots and wonderful branches... feels organic and unplanned and natural and... weird.
WHO THINKS OF THIS???? Never in my wildest imagination could I come up with this sort of thing. I get pouring glass into molds. I get blowing glass into useful shapes. But this blowing glass with the help of gravity?... wow. Brilliant.
And then they displayed them on a polished black plexiglass floor with a polished black plexiglass corner background so now all the "trees" have mirror images in three directions and the neon in the tubes lights up and it is just very very cool.
