Chris Ahalt’s menagerie of blue whales, pink hippos and gold giraffes looks like a flotilla in a really fun dream. Their balloon-animal bodies are gathered at the point of attachment in a tight little knot, tethered to a tiny lead weight.
But they aren’t latex. Ahalt, who lives in Minneapolis, makes the realistic-looking whimsical creatures of blown glass. “Balloons, to me, suggest celebration, children and wonder,” he says. “The animals that I pick appeal to those child-like sensibilities as well.”
But there’s profundity in his designs, as well. He crafts animals facing endangerment; rendering them in glass, he says, highlights not only their beauty but their precarious existence.
“The thrill never gets old of thwarting the glass’ desire to fall apart, and it’s always a victory when a piece comes together,” Ahalt says.
“At times I do wish I’d chosen a career in something a little less temperamental,” he says, laughing. “Glassblowing can be a really frustrating medium. There are countless hours lost to broken glass.” (www.thechesterfieldgallery.com)
Lots of other artists take the risk.
Danielle Blade and Stephen Gartner, glassblowers in Ashley Falls, Mass., create vessels and lighting inspired by the environment outside their rural studio.
“Both of us have strong ideas about beauty. We have spectacular gardens here, and it’s wonderful to wander them,” Gartner says.
“We’re trying to bring that walk in the woods into our living room,” says Blade.
In their Strata collection of vases and vessels, tones of warm, earthy color are blown into layers that evoke geological terrain.
A multihued pendant light brings to mind the gaseous planet Jupiter. The design duo top some objects with surprising touches — a delicate snail’s head, a sliver of animal bone or antler, or a curling leaf. (www.gartnerblade.com)
Blow your own
Casey Hyland blows softly tinged blue and white glass into vessels that look like droplets of sky with wispy clouds. He’ll teach you how to blow your own ornaments, mugs and paperweights in classes at his Louisville, Ky., studio. (www.hylandglass.com)
Loy Allen rests delicate glass monarch butterflies and dragonflies on bud vases and perfume bottles in a technique called lampworking, molding the glass over a small flame. A native South Dakotan, she’s inspired by the plant and animal life around her Hot Springs studio and the Art Nouveau movement. (www.loyallen.net)
Corvallis, Ore.-based artist Eric Bailey’s little creatures include sleek, racer-striped lizards, tree frogs and colorful snails that clamber impishly over bottles and cylindrical paperweights. (www.artfulhome.com)
Beyond objects, some glass designers are producing furniture.
The “canvas” of a coffee, dining or side table can give an artist space to do extraordinary things.
John Foster of Minneapolis assembles glass crystals into a Sparkle Palace cocktail table like a giant molecular model. When light hits it, prisms cast rainbows around the room. (www.thefancy.com)
Designer Liana Yaroslavsky’s avant garde tables encase chandeliers, or piano keys and sheet music. O2, available as a side or coffee table, suspends Murano glass balls in a transparent cube to give the effect of bubbles in water. The spherical base of her Luna table was also blown from Murano glass; it looks like she plucked the moon from the sky and rested a glass top on it. (www.lianayar.com )
