Keiko Mukaide

Some years ago Keiko Mukaide* had an installation of glass at the Hill House in Helensburgh. Her pieces were installed in the garden.

She installed many small and large blown clear glass vessels, each with some water in them, around the garden.

At the bottom of the garden

At the end of a walkway

At the bottom of stairs

And at the end of views. Each pathway is covered in white stones around the place where glass is supported on steel.

Then by the house itself she established an avenue of glass screens, again with the white base to show the glass and ...

some of the glass is with seating

The glass screens seem to form a rampart up to the paved terrace above.

While from the terrace, the glass provides a base for the view over Helensburgh to the Clyde estuary and to the hills in the South.

This is not the most widely written about installation of Mukaide's but for me it is one of the most charming in the way it both does interact and at the same time refuses to be one with the garden environment.

*From Wikipedia

Keiko Mukaide is a Japanese artist who lives and works in the UK. She studied glass at the Royal College of Art in London and was awarded a research fellowship from the Edinburgh College of Art. She has works in many public and private collections in the UK and was shortlisted for the 1998 Jerwood Prize for applied art.

Her art work employs a number of glass making techniques, casting and fusing glass in a kiln, manipulating glass in a blowing studio and even gluing shards of dichroic glass to wire nets. Her recent work has been to produce large scale, site specific installations constructed from multiple small scale glass items. "Memory of Place" funded by The Arts Council of England and Scottish Arts Council at York St. Mary's, Castlegate, York is a good example of this approach.