Chihuly’s glassworks are a once-in-a-lifetime experience for botanic garden visitors

Dale Chihuly’s glassworks represent an artistic marriage between the work of a single artist and the entire fabric of a single garden.

Dale Chihuly Red Reeds on Logs, 2024. Adelaide Botanic Garden. Picture: Nathaniel Willson.

The genesis of Dale Chihuly’s ongoing Garden Cycle, which started in 2001, lies in the artist’s interest in and appreciation of historical glasshouses. On one level, it was simply the thrill of exhibiting “glass inside glass” that first drew him to formal botanic garden environments.

But that interest soon developed into something much deeper and more enduring: a series of exhibitions set in a range of different garden environments, each of which takes the form of episodic installations of glass sculpture, all of which are distinctive and unique to a specific place.

The obvious affinities between Chihuly’s glass works and the manifold natural forms of plant life remain perhaps the most striking feature of the series as a whole. But in addressing these exhibitions on the scale of landscape – which is how they came to be conceived – it becomes clear that Chihuly and his team expend just as much time, care and thought on the rhythm of the experience, on the atmospheric or tonal particularities of each setting within the whole landscape, as they do on the smaller-scale juxtaposition of art objects and plants.

For these exhibitions to be successful, visitors ought to be able to leave with a strong and satisfying sense that they have been immersed in a variety of glass/garden episodes that somehow have coalesced into an overall picture. The success of this is most dependent not on detail but on the manner in which the glass installations or episodes are set within the garden.

The Garden Cycle has been successful partly because Chihuly responds to the individual particularities of each place and places his own works in sympathy with it so they complement the landscape and collaborate with it, rather than simply using it as a backdrop (which has been the general tradition of situating sculpture in gardens since the early 20th ­century).

While each exhibition in the Garden Cycle thus far has contained works specially fabricated in response to the site, the works on view in these exhibitions cannot in general be described as site-specific, in that they include pieces from the same sets or series, repeated or presented as variations on themes.

On the other hand, some of the power of the Garden Cycle as a whole derives from the idea that a new artistic taxonomy – in this case, an artistic classification based on Chihuly’s various glass series – has been imposed on the scientific taxonomy of the natural world that is historically associated with botanic gardens.

So while site-specific is certainly the contemporary fashion when it comes to commissioning works for landscape settings, in the case of Chihuly’s work there is no obvious advantage in its being conceived in this way.

His work in glass complements the surrounding plant life, but not by means of blending in with it.

In that sense, it has been quite appropriate to develop a range of different series of glass forms for use in disparate situations – just as plants crop up in different environments in the wild. Equally, Chihuly’s art is possessed of such material consistency and elemental power that it can stand up to a landscape setting in its own right, existing genuinely in balance with it.

The sense of the autonomy of Chihuly’s works is exaggerated by the bold notion of spreading them all the way across the botanic gardens involved in the Garden Cycle – which was quite a leap of faith for many of the institutions because it meant decisively altering the character of the garden for several months.

Dale Chihuly Polyvitro Chandelier, 2006 Adelaide Botanic Garden. Picture: Nathaniel Willson.

An awareness of the temporary nature of the exhibitions was an important aspect of their transformative – and arguably transcendent – power, since each provides those familiar with that garden with a once-in-a-lifetime ­experience.

Indoor art exhibitions have long been regarded as appropriate distractions in botanic gardens, generally taking the form of works on paper – most often, botanical illustrations. Outdoor art exhibitions and permanent installations are a more recent phenomenon in botanic gardens, a reflection of the growing popularity of dedicated sculpture gardens in the later 20th century.

The exhibitions in Chihuly’s Garden Cycle, however, stand apart from other ventures in that they represent an artistic marriage between the work of a single artist and the entire fabric of a single garden. Chihuly’s works are not simply scattered about; they are enmeshed and interwoven with the place itself – with the topography, the buildings, the ponds, the roads and pathways, and of course the plants.

As a result, the artworks not only respond to their settings but are palpably enriched by them. Emplaced as episodes within the wider landscape, they can play a role, too, within vistas, acting as new and exciting punctuation marks in the rhythm of the garden.

It is this comprehensive, immersive quality that sets the Garden Cycle apart from a regular sculpture-in-the-garden event.

The exhibitions in the Garden Cycle also enact a performative role, reinstating a tradition of wonderment in garden design that is evocative of the fetes champetres of Louis XIV’s Versailles, where sculptural, automotive, musical or light shows dazzled and impressed visitors in the wooded bosquets on either side of the Grand Canal. As with Chihuly’s garden exhibitions, there were set routes to follow around the gardens at Versailles.

The nocturnal openings that are a feature of most of Chihuly’s Garden Cycle exhibitions enhance this sense of drama and occasion, as regular visitors are enchanted to find a familiar and much-loved garden transformed by glowing artworks in coloured glass.

Seeing the glass lit at night is a completely different experience from that of seeing it by day. In the festive atmosphere of night, it is as if the gardens are there to be admired in their party dress, like a debutante who at long last has the chance to go to the ball.

The wild success of an exhibition in the famous Kew gardens, and the evident affinity of his work with plants, led Chihuly to drop everything else and embark on a concerted and still-continuing program of botanic garden ­exhibitions, most of them in the US.

Chihuly sought out different kinds of gardens in various climate zones, to add variety and richness to the series.

Working out of his warehouse-sized studios in Seattle, Chihuly and his glassblowing team have further developed a vocabulary of glass forms that can be deployed to good effect in garden settings: tall towers, elegantly stooping herons, thin reeds, clamshell-like macchia, glittering chandeliers, bulbs and boats floating on lakes and climactic suns – gorgon-like balls of yellow and orange.

Dale Chihuly The Sun, 2014, Adelaide Botanic Garden. Picture: Nathaniel Willson

Chihuly’s glass is certainly not for the colour-phobic, which is perhaps why the work has been so warmly received by the garden audience – gardeners being, by and large, chromatic hedonists and unreformed sensualists.

These coloured, squirming and writhing concoctions seem to reflect the fecundity and variety of plants in the wild, both in the violence of their colouring and in the unpredictability of their forms. It means Chihuly’s work – though clearly man-made – sits well alongside the expected delights of the tropical or temperate house.

“I love to juxtapose the man-made and the natural to make people wonder and ask, ‘Are they man-made or did they come from nature?’ ” he says.

There is something about the endless variation and mutation in Chihuly’s work that gives it a tangible affinity with natural selection, particularly the plant world.

Chihuly’s series of shapes have all been developed obsessively over decades, and multicoloured “mistakes” or mutations are displayed alongside more perfect examples, just as in nature.

“I think a lot of it comes from the fact that we don’t like to use a lot of tools,” Chihuly says, “but natural elements to make the glass – fire, gravity, centrifugal force. As a result, it begins to look like it was made by nature.”

Few of the pieces are based on ­specific botanical forms, but there is no shortage of bulbous gourds, curly tendrils and arching stalks. Despite their obvious artifici­ality, the glass pieces seem to complement the plants extremely well.

Chihuly has been developing – or evolving – these series since the 1970s, continually varying them and experimenting, and seeing them in a botanical setting does bring to mind the habits of plants in the wild: grouped in clusters or spread as if self-seeded, with small mutations and differences in size and shape.

There are other similarities: glass objects, like flowers, are usually much tougher than they look; Chihuly’s many studio failures “die” just like plants in the wild; and different types of light can transform them.

The frozen liquidity of glass as a material also seems appropriate in the moist, throbbing, fecund setting of the hothouse.

The work, in fact, emerges as analogous to that produced by the self-sustaining regimes of nature.

Dale Chihuly. Picture: Michael Buckner, Getty Images.

The idea of “evolution” in an artist’s practice is an overused analogy, but it is perhaps pertinent here because variation, repetition, death (in the sense of material failure) and selection are constant themes in Chihuly’s work. The idea of a series being perfected or finished is anathema to him.

One or two British art critics have described Chihuly’s work as vulgar – though for the most part approvingly. His works are not just colourful, they glow with colour, which can seem a little bit much to some gallerygoers.

Garden visitors, however, actively crave intense colour, so Chihuly’s work is perfect for this environment. Nature tends to extremes, after all. And is there not perhaps the slightest frisson of danger bound up with Chihuly’s creations? Coming across them, alone, in a botanic garden setting, one can feel ever so slightly vulnerable when faced with their physicality, virility and explosive aura.

Shouldn’t these things be behind bars? Perhaps that is overstating the case, but there is certainly something thrilling yet almost disturbing about some of these objects, deployed as they are in a setting – a botanic garden – that one reasonably expects to be polite, ordered, rational and probably gentrified.

The subversion of prevailing atmosphere is one of the ideas at play in the Garden Cycle.

It will be intriguing to see how the series develops further, as the variety of settings – the latest being Adelaide’s Botanic Gardens – used as venues grows ever wider.

Chihuly in the Botanic Garden runs at the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium in Adelaide until April 29. Tim Richardson is an independent garden and landscape critic and historian based in London.