I always love visiting Seattle.
Between the endless culinary delights of Pike Place Market, the stacked cellar doors in Woodinville and the restorative Pacific Northwest climate, few places in the USA can charm with such gentleness and generosity of spirit. It’s not America’s most frenetic city, but it’s easily one of the most livable with a relative calm that simply doesn’t exist the further you track down the West Coast.
Seattle, much like Washington State in general, is a great incubator for the rest of the world. Starbucks was born there, Grunge was born there, Pickleball was born there. Hell, even the modern-day backpack was born there.
But one of the most surprising features of Seattle is its importance to the visually enchanted world of glass art. Much like Venice, where the craft originated between the 13th and 15th centuries, Seattle has become a haven for this wildly experimental medium. If you ever get a chance, watching a glass artist at work is one of the most mesmerising processes in the art world, with its medieval tools and glass-melting furnaces.
Most of the discourse around American glass art centres around the commune of Pilchuck, where a world-class bohemian glass school has led to an astounding amount of experimentation in the art. A lot of this bold expansion of what glass art can be is represented in the work of Tacoma-born Dale Chihuly, whose extraordinary collection of monumental and deeply intricate glass art inspired people around the world, including in Australia.
Seattle isn’t the only city with a spiritual connection to this Venetian craft. There are two small cities in Australia that have a vibrant, incredibly productive glass art scene. One is Canberra. The other, Adelaide.
From Seattle to Adelaide
It shouldn’t some as a surprise that Adelaide is now one of the only cities outside of the US to exclusively host Chihuly’s latest edition of his highly acclaimed Garden Cycle series.
The whimsical, wonderfully imaginative concept is hinged on taking some of Chihuly’s most otherworldly glass works and putting them in situ, presenting somewhat of a psychedelic Alice in Wonderland-like storybook that unfolds in the world’s most beautiful gardens.
Since Dale first began the transformative project in 2001, he has taken his works to Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory (2001), London’s Royal Botanic Gardens (2005, 2019) and, most recently Singapore’s perfectly-aligned Gardens by the Bay (2021).
Placing Dale in Adelaide Botanic Garden
This is more than just a monumental win for Adelaide Botanic Garden. Opening at the end of September 2024, Chihuly in the Botanic Garden has already attracted the most visitors in the garden’s history. It’s still going and will run through to 29th April, 2025.
15 massive hand-blown glass installations have been plucked from Chihuly’s warehouse in Washington State and set up along a curated 2-kilometre trail, dancing with the garden’s abundant flora to create a mystifying scene. The legendary artist even created two custom-made glass sculptures for the occasion, playing on his love of organic, free-flowing forms that blend the natural world with something more.
The Jet the Crimson Fiori is Dale’s interpretation of South Australia’s signature flower, the Sturt Desert Pea, while the cinematic The Glacier Ice and Lapis Chandelier rests in the one-of-a-kind Palm House, a historic Victorian-era glasshouse imported from Bremen, Germany in 1875.
Both bespoke creations sit along a trail that runs through Chihuly’s most iconic motifs, including complicated avant-garde “stars,” brain-melting chandeliers and beautiful, brightly coloured glass balls that hang from trees, float in water and sway in the wind.
The exhibition is free during the day, but ticketed at night. After the sun sinks is the best time to head along, with adult entry setting you back $25.
After dark is when the work truly comes to life
What’s inside?
It’s possibly the most romantic walk in Australia right now, tracking Dale’s pieces all illuminated against the night sky (and the constant, ambient swarm of the park’s resident bats). Made even more festive with gentle live music, food and drink. Joining the ranks of immersive, transformative site-specific art experiences like Vivid Sydney and Parrtjima, it’s currently one of Australia’s most impressive art experiences.
If you are heading down to Adelaide Fringe this year, as most of our readers do, be sure to pop by Adelaide Botanic Garden to witness this grand spectacle before it wraps up in a couple of months. And if it does happen to inspire you to dig deeper into the world of glass art, do head on over to local glass art institution, JamFactory.
Considering Adelaide is Australia’s Glass Art Capital, JamFactory has produced many prolific names on the scene, including the humorous Tom Moore, who’s Burtonesque glass art creations also feature in the Adelaide Botanic Garden as part of the Chihuly exhibition. If you’re lucky, you might even catch him hunched over the furnace, twirling his latest creation. It’s free to watch him work from a raised platform that looks over the studio, which in itself is an interesting look into this unique artisanal craft.
Chihuly in the Botanic Garden runs until 29th April, 2025.
Chris Singh flew down to Adelaide as a guest of the Dale Chihuly exhibition and explored Seattle as a guest of Visit Seattle.
