Ginny Ruffner
American, born 1952Aesthetic Engineering Series: Inventing Flowers, 2005
On view
Lampworked, sandblasted and painted glass
Dimensions24 × 18 3/4 × 17 1/2 in. (61 × 47.6 × 44.5 cm)
Courtesy of the Isabel Foundation, L2017.106
From a young age Ginny Ruffner explored her fascination with flowers by spending time in her favorite place, the garden, painting what she saw. Today Ruffner explores her lifelong passion through glass flowers. This work, titled Aesthetic Engineering, was inspired by scientific developments in genetics that created new species. Here, Ruffner creates her own genetic experiment by making the stalks of the flowers look like DNA strands that bloom into her newly imagined species.