Renowned Philadelphia Glass Artist Judith Schaechter’s Largest Scale Work Opens at the Claire Oliver Gallery with the Exhibition, Super/Natural
Produced By Schaechter As A Penn Center For Neuroaesthetics Artist-In-Residence, The Stained-Glass Dome Is Currently Touring the Country. It Has Been Featured At The Michener, A Bucks County Art Museum Known For American Craft, With Its Next Stop At San Francisco’s Museum Of Craft And Design
Super/Natural, a monumental work, takes form as a stunning eight-foot-tall dome designed for a single viewer. The immersive stained-glass environment represents a “three-tiered cosmos” that explores the idea of biophilia, the human tendency to connect with nature.
Judith Schaechter, who lives and works in Philadelphia, produced Super/Natural in a year and a half as artist-in-residence at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. While creating this multi-tiered masterpiece of glass craft, she attended lab meetings with a pioneering team of researchers and scientists who study the neural and biological basis of aesthetic experiences. Their research, and Schaechter’s recent work, explores relationships between art, beauty, morality, and the brain.
The Super/Natural dome’s 65 panels are filled with a riot of imagined insects, flora, plants, and birds, encouraging visitors to imagine themselves subsumed in the natural world, with all its beauty, violence, decay, and growth. The central stained-glass structure, reminiscent of a church, creates a sublime sanctuary space for the secular.
“My goal is to invite viewers into a deeply personal, immersive experience that explores the connections between self, nature, and imagination,” Schaechter said. “We are ultimately connected to, not just observing, nature.”
