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BELLINGHAM, WA (MyBellinghamNow.com) – In glass artist David Wight’s Sunnyland studio, he creates on average a thousand pieces of glass sculpture each year.
Wight’s pieces can be found on cruise ships for Norwegian Cruise Lines, at Disney World and in galleries around the country. Although Wight travels the world for work, he lives and works right here in Whatcom County.
Wight started his journey as a glass artist through happenstance. During a trip post-college to the Caribbean, Wight found a lifechanging experience at a waterfall on the island of Dominica.
“I walked away from the waterfall in the late afternoon, [and] as the sound of the waterfall was diminishing, it felt like all the stress was just washing off my body, from every moment of my life, previously. And so, in feeling that experience happen, and recognizing what was happening, I then realized that it was the sound of the water that was nourishing to our nervous systems and therapeutic and healing,” he said. “Then I thought, ‘That’s now what I know is true, and that’s what I want to give to people.'”
Wight initially set out to make fountains with a bowl in that water would pool. He scrapped the idea as he learned about Dale Chihuly’s famous glass bowls, instead wanting to carve his own niche in the glass sculpting world.
Wight evolved his design to create a wave, a sort-of snapshot of water to allow people to have a piece of the ocean in their homes.
“I actually started out in Bellingham, here at a glass shop on State Street. [Then, once I] became aware that the Pilchuck Glass School even existed, I took a class there, and I only took one two-week class, because that was the time when I was transitioning from blowing glass and making water fountains to trying to figure out what other form it was,” Wight said.
Pilchuck is a glass school founded by Chihuly to educate people in glass sculpting techniques. The school offers short-term intensive courses on various techniques and artists come from around the world to attend the courses at the campus in Stanwood.
Bellingham native Wight may be born and raised in the city, but because he decided to come back after college, he said that he chose Bellingham to spend his life. During his time building his practice as a glass artist, he would live in Bellingham then commute to Seattle to work in a glass studio there.
“After those first few years, the styles and the team that needed to be assembled, the people—the guys and gals that brought the glass to me—the shop that was capable of supporting that work, and the team that I needed to work with to be able to make that scale of work didn’t exist in Bellingham,” Wight said. “And so, though I lived here, I needed to travel to Seattle to rent a shop down there and hire people that worked in the world of glass, that were highly skilled down there for 18 years.”
Wight would create the works in Seattle but pack and ship them out of his Bellingham home for much of that time.
He moved his operations back to Bellingham in the late-2010s, using the same space as a Western Washington University educator that taught the now-defunct glassblowing classes at the university. Wight took over the space completely when the educator retired from teaching in 2020.
Though he has several highly trained glass sculptors working with him to create the waves, he is proud to say that he handles much of the crafting himself.
“I didn’t understand why galleries existed because I didn’t like that idea, so I opened my own gallery up, and then I realized, ‘Oh, wow, how much time that takes to run a gallery and make the work.’ I understand why artists have other people making their working vision, but at this point, it’s been important for me to make every piece, and that might be [not] the smartest business decision, but it’s a decision that I really enjoy being able to say ‘Yes, I made it,'” Wight said.
“It takes a team to make almost anything, and that’s what I find really inspiring, is because, yes, I’m doing the sculpting, but there’s no way I could make the work I’m doing without all of the highly skilled people that are, you know, choosing to work for me. And it’s an absolute blessing, because it’s such a unique art form.” – David Wight
The entire process to create one of Wight’s smaller waves takes between 20 and 30 minutes. On a visit to Wight’s studio, My Bellingham Now witnessed the operation unfold.
After putting raw heated glass from a central furnace onto a several-foot metal pipe called a blowpipe, a studio assistant would twirl the blowpipe inside a 2,000-degree furnace, heating the molten glass to a malleable temperature. The assistant would then take the blowpipe to a table called a marver to shape the glass before adding more material. The hunk of molten glass would grow in size over the course of several rounds of this process before he would flatten and curve the glass into what would become the base of a wave sculpture.
The pole with the base would be handed to Wight, who sits on a bench as other studio workers bring blowpipes with hunks of molten glass in different colors to him, wrapping the liquid glass onto and around the base to eventually create a wave. Wight uses various tools to pull the glass into the shape he wants, and another worker would place the sculpture periodically in a nearby furnace to maintain heat and minimize risk of breaking the fragile material.
Wight’s studio is open most days of the week and he encourages those curious about the glassworking process to stop by his studio on Lincoln Street when his garage doors are open.
“It’s fun to have openings, because then people can see, ‘Wow, the rest of the picture.’ Besides that, the waves, all [these] different sculptures I’m doing that mount to the wall and that hang from the ceiling. And [so] right now, I am filled with projects that I wanted to do for myself, that are inspiring, that now need homes. So that’s the other side of it,” Wight said. “The people that collect my work, it’s keeping the business alive and the dream alive. And it wouldn’t exist if people weren’t collecting my work, because they felt joy in it as well.”
Wight currently is filling a large order for Norwegian Cruise Lines. His waves are currently on display in 25 of their ships around the world.
“It’s quite recent–within this year, [to] be working with them, for them, and having samples of my work on 25 different ships and then doing land shows,” he said. “It’s a stage that I never knew existed, that I’m now ready to step into and do presentations in front of hundreds of people and share and talk about what I’m doing in and feel capable of doing that.”
He said that his commissions for Disney are not that intensive as he still has a lot of creative license. His works have been on display at the EPCOT Theme Park at the Disney World Resort among other locations.
“[Disney is] a huge corporation, but I’m able to make the things that I want to make, and then you go through an approval process with them to make sure [everything] is in line with them,” Wight said.
Wight’s website advertises commissions for homes and other sites. On a tour of his studio, showed My Bellingham Now multiple installation works as Wight said, “waiting to find a home,” such as chandeliers and wall-mounted works.
“I’m so grateful for everyone who’s collected a sculpture, because that keeps me able to do what I love and hire folks that are in the glass world that are highly skilled that do this type of work to bring these sculptures and dreams alive,” Wight said.
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