Rachel Cohen

Glass tree. Half empty. Can’t see its forest for.

Passing through the finger lakes again, on way home, summer’s end, vacation, children have been swimming in glassy ponds.

Two weeks ago, on way out, to Corning Museum of Glass. In one gallery, this installation by Katherine Gray, Canadian. Forest Glass, 2009. A few hasty pictures, and the thought of it has stayed with me. Three tiered towers. Two thousand found glasses, machine-made. Clear glasses, and within among emerge the shapes of trees, brown glasses to form trunks, green for foliage above. Three glass trees.

Forest glass, Waldglass, made in Germany, green and brown, in the middle ages with very hot ovens, fed by burning enormous quantities of trees, leading to “widespread deforestation.” Trees into forest glass, and glass a marker of trees that were.

The children remind me that glass is neither a liquid nor a solid. Hundred year old windows thicker at the bottom because the pane has gradually flowed down.

Driving through Seneca lands. Trees through car windows.