A tree of life, a tree of light, a twisting trunk arches up and splits into four branches that yield unexpected fruit: glass clouds in soft rose and white gradients bloom like buds from the ashen plaster structure, illuminated forms that challenge the imagination.

Titled “Forget me no-w/t” in what the artist describes as a leitmotif in her work, the tree acts as a powerful symbol for the dichotomy between what is permanent and what is impermanent, a personal preoccupation that runs through much of Cattaneo’s oeuvre.

As with the small blue blossoms of the forget-me-not flower the image of the cloud tree extends out beyond itself. Rooted to the ground and the stability of the earth, the trunk feeds off the memories of the past, asking us to remember through a fixed familiar structure. Yet this solid grounded foundation gives way to the ephemeral ever-changing landscape of the sky. The transient forms of clouds caught in handblown Murano glass ask us instead to forget, resist nostalgia, and allow ourselves to reimagine and transform recollected compositions. The clouds remain up in the air: fleeting, unfixed, and unpredictable, echoing the history of the molten material from which they are made. Yet through Cattaneo’s cunning intervention this call for movement becomes tethered ever so gently and incorporated into the architecture of the known.

Here you can see the artwork on display within the Fondazione Berengo Art Space in Murano, an old furnace that has been repurposed as an exhibition space on the island of glass. The tree is exhibited alongside a ghostly glass portrait by the German artist Thomas Schütte and a white chandelier by the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei which disrupts the traditional architecture of the Venetian chandelier and its baroque botanical landscape with the artist’s own motifs. Cattaneo goes a step further, with “Forget me no-w/t” she strips back the concept of a chandelier entirely from its origins, allowing herself to simultaneously remember and forget classical forms to reimagine the future of what light and glass can do. With “Forget me no-w/t” Cattaneo invites us to grow.