DEBORA MOORE: PAPHIOPEDILUM

Exhibition Dates: April 1 - June 11, 2017
Reception Date: Saturday, April 1, 2017 - 1pm

In the Benaroya Glass Gallery, MoNA celebrates spring with a solo exhibition of works by Debora Moore spanning her 20-plus-year career in glass. Influenced by the intensity of colors and elegance of forms of orchids and other botanical species, Moore essentially paints with glass. She creates depths of vibrant colors and textures reflecting the natural forms to a remarkable degree using traditional and innovative techniques of blowing and sculpting glass.

Moore’s glass botanicals are both a visual representation and interpretation of our natural world. She has traveled extensively to observe plant life and has studied the orchid family to expand her understanding of the beautiful flowering plant. But Moore takes this even further by pushing the limits of glass, expanding the orchid family through color, and pairing the orchid with other plant life to comment on humanity’s relationship with our world. While the visual representation of an orchid emerging out of a log enveloped by moss and lichen is visually compelling, this is not a scene found in nature. Moore closely observed moss and lichen in Antarctica, which is a landscape inhospitable to the orchid. Regardless, Moore pairs the paphiopedilum, or lady slipper, with a host covered in moss. It may seem like an unlikely partnership, but we have much more to discover about the world and our relationship to it.

“I utilize the medium of glass to translate the breathtaking grandeur and delicate fragility of the natural world into a unique sculptural interpretation. The intricate structure of living things and how they thrive in harmony with each other is explored in my reflection of orchids and other botanical studies.”

–Debora Moore