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REMEMBERING AND REFLECTING ON THE DEAD – "Urns," blown glass, hold glass blown bones and skulls in the "William Morris: Early Rituals" exhibit at the Museum of Northwest Art through Sept. 29.
Dream images of William Morris's "Standing Stones" monuments at MoNA woke me at 3 a.m. after viewing the exhibit the day before.
The quietude in the back gallery at MoNA suggested timelessness. These monuments carried me back further than even life and death on Earth as Morris' glass art invites, but to the life and death of stars. Created from blown glass, they appeared to be rock and space, explosions and eerie silence all at once. Not disquieting. It invited thought and introspection.
Monuments to time – not in the sense of time passing for us mere humans but –the space-time continuum as Einstein may have imagined it. A time that no longer exists – before life poked its porous head out of the mud.
The "Standing Stones" are the result of Morris's inspiration while traveling in the Scottish Orkney Isles, where pre-Celtic people erected monoliths, not unlike Stonehenge or Easter Island. His MoNA bio states his intention was to show wonderment for the people who built these monoliths millennia ago.
Morris created glass monoliths by "gathering on the blowpipe up to 60 pounds of molten glass. The enormous, red-hot bubble was then lowered into a wooden mold where once blown it would expand to fill the hallow space. Smoke and steam would pour out to envelope the glassblowing team ... . Morris created artifacts that would suspend time."
His transparent glass urns, a poetry of skulls, femur bones, tusks, antlers – a glass graveyard of life on Earth set a million years in the future when, again, life exists no more – honor life and death's mysteries.
His bio reads that in his youth archeological remains brought "wonderment at the miracle of life and the mystery of death," inspiring him to delve into "human feelings and practices around death and memory."
Morris worked at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood as the chief glassblower for Dale Chihuly before traveling to Venice where he studied techniques from the glass Masters of Murano, Italy.
Patterson Sims, Seattle Art Museum associate art director said, "He's simply the best glass blower that America has produced."
His work can be found in art museums nationally and around the world.
"William Morris: Early Rituals" presents a selection of works created by the artist from the mid-1980s to early 1990s. The exhibit runs through Sept. 29. Executive Director and Chief Curator Stefano Catalani assembled it.
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