To step into the Palm House, at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, is to become cloistered from the outside world. To enter the realm of Edenic fantasy. The structure, built in 1877, was conceived by Richard Schomburgk, a German botanist who arrived in South Australia after studying tropical plants in the rainforest of what was then known as British Guiana: the fern, the orchid, and his favourite, the waterlily.

When I visit, one hot January afternoon, the tropical plants have been replaced by Madagascan shrubs. But through the intricate ironwork panes, which are a rich cobalt-blue, shafts of dappled light bounce off the stone grotto, the rare desert succulents, the glass chandelier that dangles from the ceiling like a pair of Medusa’s heads, their forms dancing and unfurling.

Around me, women in sun hats crane their necks to get a better look. Preteens, on school holidays, break free of their parents’ grip, gazing up in baffled awe, as if trying to decipher the object’s origins—is it a transplant from outer space, a creature from their comic books, something stranger altogether? The chandelier commands the Palm House, unites us in the collective act of looking, even when we’re not quite sure what we’ve found.

The object, of course, is Glacier Ice and Lapis Chandelier (2024), a new work, commissioned especially for the Palm House, as part of Chihuly in the Botanic Garden. It’s the first-ever Southern Hemisphere presentation of a ‘Garden Cycle’ exhibition—a series of shows, that have unfolded every-where from Chicago’s Garfield Park to the New York Botanical Garden to London’s Kew Gardens—by the legendary American sculptor Dale Chihuly. Chihuly was born in Tacoma, Washington in 1941. He studied under Murano glassblowers in Venice. He mentored a generation of glass artists—including those from Adelaide, who show their work at Gathering Light, an elegant exhibition at the Jam Factory—at his famous Pilchuck School.

He’s credited with elevating glass from craft to the realm of contemporary art and across the 15 works placed, in ‘episodes’, around the Botanic Gardens, the material ripples and wriggles and writhes. Cattails and Copper Birch Reeds (2024), which is the unearthly shade of burning flames, emerges from beds of kangaroo paw. Fiori Boat (2018), a lavish explosion of lines and bulbs and orbs hovers over a lake, a wild cacophony that strangely makes me want to be still, to take in the expanse of trees and sky, to study the water’s surface.

“The love of the medium has to do a lot with his obsession with colour and light and form,” says Rhianna Pezzaniti, the exhibition’s producer. She is leading me around the Bicentennial Conservatory where lush lowland plants play host to nine smaller Chihuly works: red-and-black nods to Sturt’s desert peas, trumpet flowers with petals mottled blue and purple. “He is well-known for pushing the medium itself. How far can you blow glass, how big can you make it, how much colour can you add to it? How can you stretch it and twist it and fuse it?”

Glass, of course, is quite literally the stuff of barriers. To make sculptures out of glass can be demanding and dangerous and expensive. The Chihuly Studio, a 2300-squaremetre space in Washington, employs 60 assistants. During the Renaissance, Venetian glass was a luxury commodity, collected by the ruling class. When I visit, an Adelaide philanthropist has purchased Glacier Ice and Lapis Chandelier as a gift to the State and the value of the donation is $800,000.

But glass is also unpredictable and fragile, prone to warping and breaking. Spending time with the works, I started thinking about Chihuly’s backstory. Visited glasshouses with his mother as a child. Lost his father and brother within a year of each other. Lost the vision in his left eye in a 1976 car accident after which he assembled a team to realise his creations and stopped blowing glass altogether.

There are questions critics level at Chihuly: can art be good if it embraces spectacle? If it’s made by other hands? If all people want to do is look at it? Botanic gardens were conceived as pleasure palaces, where the upper class convened to admire plants from different places. In the Museum of Economic Botany, next to the Chihuly giftshop, seed displays—cocoa, cotton—are symbols of colonial trade routes. Nearby, Kainka Wirra, an area that once included a eucalyptus forest and possible body of water, home to Chihuly’s Float Boat and Nijima Floats (2012-19), was named and recognised for its cultural significance by a Kaurna elder.

The following week, I line up, back in Sydney, to see a rare corpse flower bloom. What does it mean, I think, to observe the ephemeral, to take pleasure in the way that light passes through glass in spaces that are both a refuge from the wider world—and proof of all the ways that world is contested?

By day, I’m mesmerised by Ethereal Spring Persians (2022), a cluster of glass flowers atop a bed of waterlilies. When I return at night, I don’t notice the sculpture as much as the movement of their petals, that they are no longer open, and I am grateful for the way Chihuly’s works have given me the unexpected gift of attention.

Chihuly in the Botanic Garden
Adelaide Botanic Garden (Adelaide/Kaurna Country)
On now—29 April

This article was originally published in the March/April 2025 print edition of Art Guide Australia.