La Ragnatela/The Spiderweb: Works by Giampaolo Seguso from the Corning Museum of Glass
The Bellarmine Museum
April 10 - June 13, 2014
La Ragnatela (or "spider web") refers to the characteristically long, thin, lines and complex patterns of filigrana vases. A glass-making technique that was invented in 1527, filigrana consists of preparing parallel glass canes that are then melted into a mass of incandescent glass, creating perfect geometrical shapes in net and spiral-lie patterns.
It is still practiced today by the master glass-maker Giampaolo Seguso, whose family has been making glass on the Venetian island of Murano for more than 600 years. The second part of the three-part project Seguso calls "La Galleria dei 99," La Ragnatela is documented in an eponymous book that beautifully illustrates the 33 glass objects in this series; each of which is accompanied by one of Seguso's evocative poetic mediations on the complexities of moral existence, the beauty of the natural world, and the power of the human spirit. Examples of all 33 vases will be on view (on loan from the Corning Museum of Glass) together with copies of the creator's poetry.