Wesley Fleming creates exquisitely detailed glass sculptures that are inspired by the natural world. The exhibit Wesley Fleming: Silvestris, Wild and Untamed, featuring six of Fleming’s recent works, is on view in BMAC’s Spotlight Gallery through October 12, 2020.

Wesley Fleming, "Cypripedium acaule, or Pink Ladyslipper" (2020), hot sculpted glass, adhesive [detail]. Photo credit: Victor Janczar

BMAC: The sculptures in your BMAC exhibit depict spring wildflowers and insects. Do these new pieces differ from your previous work in any way?

Fleming: My work is pretty much all inspired by nature. With insects, I’ve come to a point where I’m trying to help people appreciate insects better, so I make a non-scary version of them. Insects are a very important part of our world. The flowers are something I’ve come to more in the last few years. I’d sort of painted myself into a corner with the insects, so I’ve been branching out with flowers and plants and going in a more complex direction with things that are more challenging to make. The new sculptures at BMAC are more complex than much of my previous work.

When I talked with Linda [Whelihan, former Education Curator] about doing this exhibit, it was in March of 2019, during the GLASSTASTIC exhibit. Spring wildflowers were about to happen, and it felt like a really great thing to focus on. In mid-March of this year, when the exhibit went up, it was before the wildflowers came out in mid-April and mid-May. The exhibit was going to be a warmup to spring and these flowers and the joys of life returning in New England. I installed the exhibit on March 12, and then the opening was canceled and everything was shut down.

BMAC: How did you first get into sculpting insects out of glass?

Wesley Fleming, "Rubus pensilvanicus, or Raspberry" (2020), hot sculpted glass [detail]. Photo credit: Victor Janczar

Fleming: When I started making glass, I was working in a glass studio in Boston. I was doing a demonstration at a street fair, and I couldn’t decide what I was going to demonstrate. I was across from a vendor who had real insects that he had captured and mounted in shadow boxes. I saw the insects with their hard shiny bodies and realized they would lend themselves very well to glass. I’ve always been interested in weird and strange things. I was inspired by a lot of science fiction, fantasy, Star Wars growing up. I grew up out in the woods. I tried making insects for that street fair demo; it went well for me, people were interested in it, and so I gradually transitioned into making more and more insects.

BMAC: What are some of the ways that nature inspires your work?

Fleming: I spend a lot of time out in the woods. I go hiking several times a week. I live in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and the woods surround my house. I’m very inspired by nature. Photography has been a hobby for my whole life. I always take a lot of pictures of things that inspire me and that I think are beautiful. I have an Instagram account that is a way to market my glasswork but also a way to get my hobby of photography out there. I’m on Instagram @vetropod. That’s a play on the word vetro, the Italian word for glass, and arthropod, which is insects and other hard-bodied invertebrates.

BMAC: In creating your glass sculptures, do you work from photographs?

Fleming: Sometimes I get commissions from people who want something very specific, so I’ll have photos on my workbench as I work. I have also seen so many insects, and I have a pretty good visual memory, so for a lot of things, I work from my mind bank, so to speak.

Each of the pieces in the BMAC exhibit is a very specific species. I worked from a series of pictures for those. For some pieces, it’s a closely related creature to what I’ve seen, but that might be more appealing to people visually. I’m really trying to inspire people to love the smaller things of our world, so sometimes I add the fantastical in to help with that.

BMAC: What sorts of fantastical elements are in the exhibit?

Fleming: One of the pieces, “Trout Lilies,” is a little bouquet of trout lilies. They’re one of the first flowers that blooms in the springtime out in the woods. Hidden in with the trout lilies are three trout lily fairies. If you just walk past the piece, you wouldn’t notice them, but if you stop and really look at it, they’re not all flowers. Another piece in the exhibit is a Hepatica flower, and that one has more obvious fairies that are tucked in among the blossoms. They have been out nectar-gathering, so they just happen to be there when you walk by.

Wesley Fleming, "Erythronium americanum, or Trout Lily" (2020), hot sculpted glass, adhesive [detail]. Photo credit: Victor Janczar

BMAC: Your work is really well suited to this moment in some ways—in terms of encouraging people to notice the smaller things and get out in nature. What are some of the things you’ve been thinking about during this time?

Fleming: It’s been really beautiful to me how many more people have been out hiking. It’s been amazing to see how many more people are getting out and noticing things and enjoying nature. There are fewer airplanes flying. It’s obviously been a hard hit on the economy, but the earth has been taking a good deep breath while humans have hibernated for a few months.

I live a life of isolation as an artist. I work from home, and at first I felt like it wasn't going to impact me. One of the mixed blessings of the shutdown has been realizing how much I value my human interactions in the world. It’s been quite depressing being cut off from that. It was a shocking revelation, and I have struggled with that off and on during the shutdown.

When shutdown first started, I took on too many commissions, but if it weren't for those, I’d just be making the fastest, smallest things that I could be making. It’s really hard for me right now as an artist to think about creativity and what I see in the world. I've lost sight of a lot of what normally drives me.

BMAC: How did you first get involved with the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center?

"Mushroom Guardian" created in glass by Wesley Fleming, designed by Colin Chicoine. Photo credit: Joshua Farr

Fleming: The last GLASSTASTIC, a little over a year ago, was my first involvement with BMAC. They've been so wonderful to work with. Everyone there is really engaged with their work and seems to be really happy to be there. For GLASSTASTIC, I created a mushroom warrior with a spear, holding a little version of himself in his hand. At the opening, it was really fun to meet the kid who had drawn the picture. It was amazing leafing through all the drawings, seeing the imagination and creativity of kids. As an adult who works as a creative person, it can be really hard to tap into that sometimes, and there was so much overflowing creativity in every one of those drawings, so it was a fun project to do.

I’m really grateful to Linda Whelihan for asking me to do this exhibit. This was my first solo exhibit, and it pushed me to fill a space with something creative and all in the same theme. I put about three to four months’ work into those six pieces. It was an amazing long-term project for me—it was a year from the time we started talking about it till it went up. It really filled my heart and my mind. There were times when I was aggravated and upset with what I was trying to do, and times when I was excited and pleased with it as well, so it pushed me in a lot of directions. I enjoyed working with everyone—Linda, Erin Jenkins, Sarah Freeman, Danny Lichtenfeld. All of them were a pleasure to interact with, and I really enjoyed the experience. I’m really grateful to them for that.

Someone commented on Instagram that they had not noticed a particular kind of flower before out in the woods, and now that they had seen my exhibit, they were noticing those flowers. That was a special blessing to me that I had touched someone with the knowledge of those plants, and appreciating the natural world more. That is the highest compliment I can get, when I’ve helped turn people on to nature. That’s what I seek to do with my work.