Imagine this ballroom sized chandelier crowding everything else out of your dining room. More than 6 ft. wide, it hangs ceiling-to-floor at the Northern Clay Center where it's the amazing center piece of a show by David Swenson and Kip O'Krongly. Both are on staff at the NCC where he is in charge of building maintenance and O'Krongly is the center's materials and glaze technician. Swenson made the chandelier out of terra cotta, a fragile and highly breakable material that usually shows up in floor tiles and almost never in anything as elaborate and fanciful as this item. On the NCC website he talks about the careful engineering needed "to train a material that would otherwise be less apt to maintain itself." Indeed.
