If you’ve been to London’s Victoria & Albert museum, you’ve surely seen the huge green-and-blue glass chandelier in the main lobby. It is a wonderfully contradictory piece of art – it probably weighs a few tonnes, yet it looks light and slender and snaky. I’ve been fascinated by it ever since I first saw it, and admire it every time I visit the museum.
The creator of the chandelier is Dale Chihuly, and Kew Gardens is currently hosting a whole exhibition by him, called Gardens of Glass.
A few large outdoor pieces were immediately visible as I walked in through Victoria Gate – two bright bundles of snakes (like the V&A chandelier) at the entrance of the tropical greenhouse, and floating colourful bubbles in the pond.
But most of Chihuly’s installations were scattered throughout the greenhouses, which turned out to be an eminently suitable setting for them. One of the advantages of this arrangement was that the installations were unpredictable. In a gallery, you always know that there will be more art around the next corner. Here, art had to be discovered, and often took me by surprise: lilac rods of glass between agaves in the desert; wobbly yellow plates in a carp pond; a mass of huge patterned balls arranged like a string of balloons rising towards the greenhouse roof, and my favourite – a chandelier of red and yellow plates.
I’ve always wondered how the V&A chandelier was constructed. It obviously couldn’t have been transported there as it is. You couldn’t even lay it flat without crushing half of it. Today I finally found out, from a documentary showing Chihuly at work.
In effect, the chandeliers are constructed on giant bottle drying racks. Inside, there is a metal core. The core is sparsely covered with hundreds of metal spikes – one for each piece. The glass pieces are then stuck on those spikes, and a wire tied around the neck of each piece attaches it to the core.
Assembling a chandelier requires a team of several people, and takes a few days. And because they are reassembled every time, they will always come out slightly different, and evolve over time. The Sun, for example, started out entirely monochrome yellow, yet has now acquired dashes of bright red and blue.