ANNE AND PATRICK POIRIER
November 29th – January 10th 2004
« In 1978 we undertook our first homage to Blaschka, the Bohemian master glass-blower charged by a 19th Century botanist to reproduce, in the form of glass models, the entire flora of North America. Blaschka never actually set foot in America. He worked off specimens sent him from there, and ferried back by him to that place of origin as models of an astounding fragility, in packagings of his own making, themselves, in their own right, masterpieces.
He devoted his entire life to this immense enterprise, which ended up needing to be, in any case, completed by his son. This utterly rare glass botanical collection is housed, today, at The Harvard University Art Museums, where an entire floor is dedicated to it. The glass objects are themselves displayed in glass cases, which combination further accentuates the feeling of extraordinary fragility the whole enterprise emanates and explores. A number of them are slightly chipped, or broken, and the simple caption :
Selected works
