A debut! For the first time we at Lower East have done the design for an entire exhibition. We enjoyed the work so much, loved the cooperation with Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, and are happy and proud of the result. Come by and check it out! The exhibition runs until March 2020.

About “Chinese Whispers“: With the participation of 15 international glass artists from different countries British artist, Erin Dickson, examines ideas of national identity across borders. The exhibition is part of ‘From Where We Stand – 7 Exhibitions on National Identity’, a collaboration between seven Danish art museums.

The expression Chinese Whispers is commonly used in many English speaking countries around the world as the name of a very simple game. A person whispers a sentence into the ear of the person sitting next to him or her, and the next person passes the whisper on to the person next to him or her and so on until the last person says the sentence out loud. By now the initial sentence will be totally changed beyond recognition.

Chinese whispers for glass practitioners

Erin ­Dickson’s Chinese Whispers started in Italy, where she saw a classic Venetian vessel at the Murano Glass Museum in 2015.

Erin Dickson asked the Italian glassblower Silvano ­Signoretto to recreate the vessel in black glass from a photo, and then describe his working process with 100 words. Using Google Translate, his description was then translated from Italian to the native language of the next artist in line. From this auto generated translation, the next artist would then create his or her version of the vessel and so on.

The results of this ‘whispering game’ for glass ­practitioners are 15 variations of the original vessel, ­interpreted and recreated by artists across the globe.

Exhibition design

Our inspiration was: movement, travel, transport, transformation, red dot “from where we stand“. Colours and materials: white, red, grey and wood. We created an exhibition landscape of transport boxes, where the 15 vessels are exhibited. The boxes visualize the idea that both stories and vessels have been on a long journey to end up in Ebeltoft. For artists names on the boxes we designed “transport notes“. Guests can walk around and study the transformation of the vessels from one artists to the next‚ they can sit down and read the small booklet we designed to study see how the texts evolve through the journey. On the wall we have handpainted a huge worldmap. The guests can, via the red thread, follow the route of the stories from one artist to the next across the globe. Every artist has a red dot and a number, so you can find there texts in the booklet.