Debora Moore shaping blown glass, Chrysler Museum of Art Perry Glass Studio, Norfolk, VA, 2012 Visiting Artist Series. Photo by Echard Wheeler
Debora Moore (b. 1960, resides Seattle) has explored the expressive potential of flora through glass since the late 1980s. She has focused largely on orchids, which are informed by her deep engagement with nature. Moore’s field study has taken her around the globe to observe and sketch specimens, including trips to India, Antarctica, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Moore’s work belongs to a long history of representing plants in glass that ranges from ancient renderings to the botanical studies of nineteenth-century Bohemian craftsmen Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.
Even with her intensive study, Moore is interested less in realism than in how, through glass, she can capture and transport a personal experience with the beauty, wonder, and resilience of the natural world. Her ability to achieve this goal is a result of mastery cultivated across years as an integral figure in the storied glass community of the Pacific Northwest, home to the Pilchuck School of Glass. Moore began her study there in the 1990s and worked as a member of founder Dale Chihuly’s glassblowing team. A trailblazer in many ways, Moore was the first female and first African American resident at the storied Abate Zanetti on Murano, the Italian island that became a glass powerhouse starting in the thirteenth century.
Debora Moore’s new tour de force series, Arboria (2018), featured in this exhibition, has branched out from the orchid to focus on four life-size flowering trees of different varieties: cherry, magnolia, winter plum, and wisteria. This work presents a new chapter in the long history of representing plants in glass, which ranges from ancient renderings to nineteenth-century models used for scientific study.
On the Blog
Eye Level, February 18, 2021, “Debora Moore’s Glass Sculptures are Rooted in Nature”
Debora Moore, one of four artists featured in the exhibition Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020, is best known for capturing the expressive potential of flowers with her detailed glass sculptures of orchids, orchid trees, and bamboo shoots. The works featured in Forces of Nature are Moore’s tour de force. The series Arboria (2018), four life-size glass renderings of flowering trees set in rugged terrain, conveys the strong yet fragile nature of not just the glass itself, but the trees they emulate and underscores the power of natural forces and the splendor that derives from persistence. With her work, Moore is interested less in realism and more in capturing an intensely personal experience of beauty and wonder.
Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 was presented by the Smithsonian American Art Museum at its Renwick Gallery from October 16, 2020, to June 27, 2021. The exhibition features artists Lauren Fensterstock, Timothy Horn, Debora Moore, and Rowland Ricketts. Each of these invited artists looks to nature as a way to contemplate what it means to be human in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape. Representing craft media from fiber to mosaic to glass and metals, these artists approach the long history of art’s engagement with the natural world through unconventional and highly personal perspectives.
On Thursday, January 28, 2021, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) presented an engaging online conversation with Debora Moore, one of the four artists featured in Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020. Discover the beauty and wonder of the natural world through Moore's spectacular glass sculptures. In this lively conversation, Moore discusses her creative process and work featured in “Forces of Nature” with Stefano Catalani, exhibition juror and executive director of the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. Learn more about Moore’s history as a trailblazer in the glass field, and why experiencing nature is key to her development as an artist.
Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 was presented by the Smithsonian American Art Museum at its Renwick Gallery. The exhibition features artists Lauren Fensterstock, Timothy Horn, Debora Moore, and Rowland Ricketts. Each of these invited artists looks to nature as a way to contemplate what it means to be human in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape. Representing craft media from fiber to mosaic to glass and metals, these artists approach the long history of art’s engagement with the natural world through unconventional and highly personal perspectives.
The Smithsonian Women's Committee Endowment provided generous funding for Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 public programs.
Arboria Series
The Arboria series—a suite of immaculately crafted and evocative glass trees—is Moore’s most recent tour de force. The project began nearly a decade ago, as images of delicate, gravity-defying trees envisioned in the artist’s sketchbooks. Moore was able to bring these drawings into reality at the invitation of the Tacoma Art Museum, which commissioned her to produce work to mark the opening of its Benaroya wing in 2018. Arboria blends observations of nature from across Moore’s lifetime into four human-scaled trees loosely corresponding to the cycle of the seasons, titled Wisteria, Magnolia, Cherry, and Winter Plum.
The two-year process of creating these works began at a quarry, where Moore selected natural stones as bases. She then blew glass directly over the rock’s surface, using nature as her mold. Moore’s ingenious method for hiding her joins adds to the illusionary magic in her works: a “liquid skin” composed of silicone, crushed glass, and pigment is applied in irregular patches for a seamless finish. The finished trees are full of beauty in contradiction, composed of glass manipulated in ways that seem to defy the possibilities of the medium. They are strong and fragile, natural and fabricated, technically astonishing and seemingly effortless. Just like nature, their beauty derives in no small part from their persistence.