Grapevine Glass Sculpture
Design Completed
Napa California 2016
The inspiration for this design is the expansive, majestic vineyards of California’s wine country. Grapes are one of the oldest cultivated crops in the world, and are thus frequently used as iconography for life. This is seen in Christianity’s use of wine to symbolize Christ’s blood as well as common depictions of the Greek god of agriculture, Dionysus, adorned in grape leaves and vines. Holistic medicine historically used grape leaves to stop bleeding, ensuring the continued flow of life through a wounded body. The use of the color green, traditionally associated with the new life of spring time, reinforces the ideas of freshness and growth in connection with the more matured life represented by the red grapes. California wine country overflows with complex life centered around its grapevines, and the multi-dimensionality of the design physicalizes that relationship.
The central stem of the design is the main structural component, using stainless steel to support the forty-eight blown glass circle “grapes.” The use of tinted glass pays homage to the simple, elegant beauty of a grape and creates a visual trick with its color reflection and translucency: as the overlap between circles changes when the viewer changes their vantage point, the number and shape of the grapes appears to change as well. This evokes an additional visual impression of growth and bounty. Each blown glass piece is hand-tinted to obtain a natural variation in texture and gradation, reminding the viewer that agriculture such as California wine grapes are not churned out in a factory, but lovingly drawn from the natural earth.
60″ x 120″ x 40″ 2016