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Tapio Wirkkala: Poet in Glass and Silver - An exhibition of Wirkkala’s glass works

Dawson, curating this exhibition for the Finnish Glass Museum, aimed to extend the boundaries of existing knowledge about this seminal figure in 20thC art and design. The majority of the objects included in the exhibition were selected from the most important collection of Wirkkala’s work that is privately owned by the Finnish collector Kyosti Kakkonen, and which is not normally on public display. Over the years Kakkonen has built up a collection that includes numerous variations of Wirkkala’s key exemplars, and which provide important insights into the designer’s approach to glass, silver and the plywood abstract sculptures. International exhibitions have become increasingly important, with the actual curating and the resultant cultural manifestations forming a vital and critical point of intervention between the viewer and the objects, the relationship of object to object, the context in which the exhibition is placed, and the accompanying interpretation with its specific methodologies and intellectual focus. In this sense, major exhibitions such as the Wirkkala project are not merely the result of ‘putting on a show’, but provide a space for debate around the discourses that both inform the current theoretical ambition and the discourses that are being potentially challenged or that have informed the past. Finnish Glass Museum, Riihimaki May-December 2013.