Host IX-Epidendrum

Orchid trees and bamboos—ranging from individual flowers to wallsize installations that suggest a primordial forest—are the subjects of Debora Moore’s sculptures. Host IX–Epidendrum depicts a star orchid that Moore hot-sculpted at the furnace. Orchids of the genus Epidendrum are epiphytic, which means that they grow on other plants. In nature, the pale, delicate flowers—seemingly fragile and luminescent—hang from the dark trunks of the trees on which they thrive. Moore captures the quality of these ethereal plants by her close observations, and by the fast, spontaneous, and often risky way in which she handles the hot glass.
Walking through rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, where she lives, or on her travels around the world, Moore makes quick sketches in the field in watercolor. “What I make is my interpretation,” she says. “The lady’s-slipper orchid, for example, is never blue or green. But when light hits it in a certain way, I see striations of blue and green, and that’s how I make it.”
While Moore is inspired by the work of the Bohemian artists Leopold Blaschka (1822–1895) and Rudolf Blaschka (1857–1939)—who made thousands of botanical models in glass for Harvard University between 1886 and 1936—her observations are not meant to be scientific. “I am interested in portraying the fundamental design of plants and flowers on a more interpretative level,” she explains. “I work the glass in a very organic and fluid fashion, which gives these studies a sense of naturalness while not restricting myself to realistic representations.”