Heart of glass
| 10 September, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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Interactivity at the Natural History Museum, London
Bob’s article last week about the wonderful paintings at the Natural History Museum attracted a comment from ‘Mary B’ in Cambridge, Mass., telling us about the glass sculptures at Harvard’s Natural History Museum. There are some lovely photos of the sculptures, some of which it’s difficult to believe are glass.
This reminded of the time I went to Kew Gardens, back in the summer of 2005. It was my first trip there, and I took over 100 (digital) photographs, including some of the marvelously organic sculptures of Dale Chihuly.
Chihuly at Kew Gardens, Wikimedia Commons
Like gigantic flowers, these sculptures have a vitality and brilliance that had me wandering around open-mouthed for hours. Unfortunately, between sticking the photos I took onto my external hard drive and backing them up to CD, that drive failed and they are no more.
by Virtual Farm Boy, Flickr
Thank goodness for Google, Flickr and social media.
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What a shame you lost the photos, that would have been a great addition to your blog. The samples you have here and on the link you gave show that this exhibit is indeed unique. Thanks for the mention though, obviously this is a must-see!
Confused again by a title, I thought this was a post about the gene…
Mably JD, Mohideen MA, Burns CG, Chen JN, Fishman MC. heart of glass Regulates the Concentric Growth of the Heart in Zebrafish. Curr Biol. 2003 Dec 16;13(24):2138-47.
Kleaveland B, Zheng X, Liu JJ, Blum Y, Tung JJ, Zou Z, Chen M, Guo L, Lu MM, Zhou D, Kitajewski J, Affolter M, Ginsberg MH, Kahn ML. Regulation of cardiovascular development and integrity by the heart of glass-cerebral cavernous malformation protein pathway. Nat Med. 2009 Jan 18. [Epub ahead of print]
ha ha! Nice one, Jon.
(Hmm. I share a citation with one of those authors, funnily enough.)
The top photo reminds me of a similar swirly sculpture at the Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, NY). The only real difference is the color (their sculpture is sort of a fluorescent yellow/green) and the scale (theirs is very tall and thick, maybe over 8-9ft? and 4-5ft wide?). Perhaps its from the same artist.
The photos you have are beautiful. Its a shame about the hard drive failure. Have you tried your techie guys to see if they can recover the files? It can usually be done professionally for a fair bit of money, but there is software around that can do it very reasonably if you are technically inclined and a bit patient. Feel free to ask me for more details if you want to pursue this avenue (assuming you have not thrown out the HD, etc)
Hi Douglas
Yes, I still have the drive somewhere, in case I ever had the money to spend to recover it. I should try plugging it in and seeing what happens 5 years later!