Venice Glass Week to host ‘Maru Mori’ blown glass

Dutch glass artist Bibi Smit will be showing her colourful blown glass sculptures, ‘Maru Mori: The Heartbreaking Simplicity of Ordinary Things’ at Venice Glass Week in Italy this September.

These sculptures were inspired by the moment in which petals and fruits pass their best and fall to the ground. They become new fragments of nature’s beauty, reflecting their bygone glory.

These works evolved from her ‘Clouds’ series. Bibi explains, “I became more excited about the beauty of simplicity, as an individual fragment of nature, and how you can get so much joy from a tulip petal that falls on the table, for example. It is also how the name came about ‘Moru Mori: the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things’. This was taken from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. The work has a stillness and quietness, and I found the poetry of the words to have the same feeling.”

Bibi wanted to make more of the colour and outside shape of her glass, so she closed the opening more to make that more noticeable and created tension and distortion in the shape. This distorted, awkward and clumsy shape was designed to reflect the petal that has just passed its best as it falls off the flower. “It becomes that shape that is still beautiful and still has all the fragility and colour but it’s just slightly contorted,” she continues. “At the end, I was getting really excited about adding a different kind of skin to the glass, so the glass is not only shiny and colourful, but it has this feel of faded and textured bygone glory. I am really excited about going back to the studio in the cold shop and make some new textures and shapes and creating more depth in the surface.”

See Bibi Smit’s new work at: Venice Glass Week HUB Exhibition, on the first floor of Palazzo Loredan, Venice, Italy. The show is on from 17-25 September 2022, opening on 16 September 2022.

Read more about Bibi’s previous work here.

Main image: Bibi Smit’s ‘Maru Mori’ will be shown at Venice Glass Week. Photo: Frieda Mellema.