Blenko 9223 - a fish in praise of water
Updated: 3 days ago
Milton, West Virginia, 1992 · Parc de la Creueta del Coll, Barcelona
Blenko 9223 is a fish vase blown by hand at the Blenko factory in Milton, West Virginia. It first appears in the Blenko catalogue of 1992. It is sometimes called the Standing Fish Vase; the catalogue gives only the number. This one is Antique Green, with a clear fin, eyes and foot.
What the catalogue says
In 1992 the fish is listed as a vase twelve inches tall, in four colours: Azure, Crystal, Orchid and Antique Green. Three of them stand on that year's catalogue cover. From 1995 the catalogue gives it in pairs of colours, Antique Green with Cobalt among them, and in 1999 it adds a frosted version. After 2002 the number is gone.
Like the fish on the 1992 cover, this one has a clear fin and foot. It stands 31.5 cm tall and weighs 1.59 kg; the catalogue gives twelve inches, about 30.5 cm.
On its side is the Blenko block-B label with the word HANDMADE, a label collectors date to 1982–1999. Underneath is the pontil mark, where the iron rod held the vase while it was finished. The 1992 catalogue itself points to this mark as evidence of work by hand.
The designer
No designer is printed beside the number. The catalogue's colophon names one: Hank Adams, design director. Blenko kept one designer at a time, so the fish is attributed to him.
Hank Murta Adams was born in Philadelphia in 1956. He studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, took glass classes there with Dale Chihuly, and went on to study glass at Penland and Pilchuck. He was Blenko's design director from 1988 to 1994. His own work is sculpture: rough, figurative pieces, many of them cast.
In a 2019 interview he recalled arriving with a simple idea of the job: draw the shapes and give them to the teams to make. He soon realised he was responsible for "140 families". He named many of his own pieces after the factory's glassblowers, among them two brothers known as Radio and TV.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum writes that his sculpture "abandons the conventional function of glass to transmit light". The fish made at the factory in his years keeps that function. In the sun it throws a net of light on the wall, like light on the floor of a pool.
In praise of water
On an overcast afternoon the vase went to the Parc de la Creueta del Coll, in Barcelona's El Coll neighbourhood.
The park was made from an old quarry. It began with a neighbourhood request in 1976 and opened in 1987, designed by the architects Martorell, Bohigas and Mackay. Its large lake becomes a public swimming pool in summer.
At the far end, over a smaller pool of its own, hangs Eduardo Chillida's Elogi de l'aigua, In Praise of Water, installed in 1987: 54 tonnes of reinforced concrete on four steel cables anchored in the rock. The city's own description speaks of a surprising lightness. For Chillida the water was part of the work: the form held in the air was to be reflected below, as in the myth of Narcissus.
A fish by the water
Some things are easier to see somewhere else. The vase and the park have three things in common.
Colour. Antique Green against the turquoise of the pool. Held up against the water, the vase shows it through its glass.
Weight. Fifty-four tonnes of concrete that seem to float. 1.59 kilograms of glass that light passes straight through.
Water. A sculpture made to be seen twice, in the air and in the water. A fish made to hold water.
Both are sculptors' work that ended up in everyday life: one hangs at the end of a neighbourhood swimming pool, the other was made for a table.
A grey afternoon, a glass fish held up to the water, and the water inside it.
More on the factory in the notes on Blenko.
Photographs: MYT', Barcelona.
Sources: Blenko catalogues, 1992–2004; Bard Graduate Center, Voices in Studio Glass History; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Ajuntament de Barcelona; El País, 1 May 1998.
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