Last night’s Cafe was unexpectedly fascinating. Drew Harvell spoke about the marine environment, but approached it not from the expected negative images of overfishing, pollution, and increases of coastal population. She focused on the bizarre forms and colors of marine life, and shared her passion of the intriguing life forms in the ocean. A tool that has been used to truly capture the intricate ocean life forms, is the Blaschka glass collection. The majority of the talk consisted of a screening of the short documentary, Fragile Legacy, which outlines the Blaschka art and how the glass acts as a time capsule to compare the ocean from the 1860s, when the glass was created and the current ocean environment. It is an incredible film, and is currently a finalist in five film festivals.

What truly fascinated me was the glass itself. My father is a glass blower at the Corning Museum of Glass, and we have a glass studio at my home, therefore I am quite familiar with the process of lamp working and glass blowing, and how difficult creating this art form can be.

What influenced Leopold Blaschka and Rudolph Blaschka to take on this intricate challenge of creating some of the most talented glass pieces to date was the ways of exhibiting delicate specimen. Displays of stuffed and mounted wolves, bears, and birds posed in life-like positions were fairly easy to achieve, but exhibiting delicate specimens such as flowers or sea invertebrates posed a distinct challenge.  Botanical specimens could be pressed and dried, creating a flatter, less colorful version of the original plant, but invertebrates had to be preserved in jars of alcohol, which faded the colors and caused the bodies to gradually collapse.  Neither option was terribly inspiring for the public and certainly made the scholarly study of the specimens more difficult.

They made thousands of intricately worked, carefully detailed glass models of invertebrates and botanical specimens for the use of teaching aids and in exhibits, including the famous collection of glass flowers at Harvard University. What truly amazes me is how accurately and finely they captured every detail. They did this so well, that Drew Harvell took on the challenge of identifying marine life from these glass pieces.

It is truly saddening that throughout the years many of these pieces were broken in storage, but through the work of restoration, some of these pieces will be able to be appreciated once again.