Delicate Pink Gold Cloud, 2024

Born in Canada, Michèle Oberdieck has been working with blown glass since her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2016. She previously studied textile design at Glasgow School of Art and ran a successful printed textile practice for several years. This shift of material was the result of a significant commission involving the development of a new technique of fusing printed fabrics between sheets of glass. A moment that sparked curiosity in this new medium, paving the way for a new creative direction. Oberdieck has exhibited internationally and her work was selected for the European Prize for Applied Art Exhibition 2022 in Belgium, as well as the Ireland Glass Biennale 2019, being one of just 50 international artists on show. Most recently, Oberdieck was awarded the QEST (Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust) grant in 2023, allowing continued training in blown and sculpted glass.

Fantasy Plants is a series of imagined blown glass plants intended to question the effects of climate change and cross pollination, based on research into extinct plants, the work of scientists, and the study of how plants are adapting to survive in the future. Working with Kew Garden’s Herbarium and the John Innes Centre, Oberdieck has been able to access unique imagery from Victorian botanical drawings, cellular microscopy and sub cellular imaging techniques; alongside the plants we see every day in the garden and in markets. This research resulted in the creation of a series of abstracted plant forms blown from hot glass. Beginning as gestural sketches idealising what plants might need to survive in the future, each process has edited down details which are blown into glass components and applied hot to a glass core. Through editing and accepting the natural movements of hot glass, these glass botanicals start to take on a life of their own, sometimes resembling other species. They are imagined, other worldly botanicals.