Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
Each year, Blenko Glass Company celebrates West Virginia Day with a limited edition piece designed and created by artisans at its headquarters in Milton.
This year, creative director James Arnett drew inspiration from the Green Bank Telescope for the West Virginia Day piece – a large plate.
“We approached West Virginia Day with the theme of the year,” Arnett said. “The theme of the year was the year of new space age design, so a lot of the designs we’ve had for other holidays and other times of the year have been designed to reflect our inspiration from space.
“I kind of set up the theme this year explicitly to land at the Green Bank Telescope,” he added.
With just a little more than a year at Blenko, this is the second West Virginia Day piece Arnett has designed.
To accompany the limited edition plate, there are two companion pieces – a tangerine decanter with a vintage flying saucer shape and a turquoise GBT sun catcher. The companion pieces are not limited in number and will be available for two weeks for purchase.
To commemorate the 161st celebration of the formation of West Virginia, 161 of the plates will be made and auctioned off between June 15 and 20.
“We will be taking individual photographs of every single one of the numbered plates and we will put each one of those online for a five-day auction,” Arnett said. “We are encouraging our customers to surf through the pictures, find the one that they like in particular and bid on that plate.”
The process of making the plates is very uniform, but as it is with all handmade items, the plates will have small variations.
After Arnett settled on the design, the mold was hand carved by mold maker Daniel Chapman. Then the pieces were hand-blown in the hot shop.
“That’s the tightrope that we walk,” Arnett said of the uniformity. “Everything we make, every single product we make is handmade, and we want to conform, of course, to predictable expectations, but it’s always just a little variable. One of the most beautiful things about these plates is every single one of them picks up that white color and that pattern in a slightly different way. Some of them become sort of galaxies and nebulas. Some have clear white lines. Across the board, they’re remarkable to look at.”
The auction will go live on the Blenko website on June 15 at blenko.com
The companion pieces are available for purchase now online.
Blenko also has an exhibit – Blenko Now – opening this summer at the Birke Art Gallery at Marshall University. It will be open June 21 through August 26 and will feature a selection of contemporary designs from 2020 to present day.
