Saint Heron Small Matter Art Objects presents Decanters 001, a series of newly designed glass decanters by Solange Knowles, conceived as both functional vessels and contemplative objects. Moving beyond their role as containers, Decanters 001 acts as active collaborators in the transformation of what they hold—engaging with light, material, and time to shape the experience of the liquid within. Each unique piece plays with its own individual scale, volume, and transparency becoming an orchestrator of form, where illumination and circulation subtly influence the contents.
Decanters 001 enhance both presentation and form while the objects reveal the quiet, transformative nature of their contents.
In a collaboration designed by multidisciplinary artist Solange Knowles and produced by glassblower Jason McDonald, SAINT HERON’S SMALL MATTER ART OBJECTS: DECANTERS 001 materializes the palpable transformation of sand and fire into unique glass objects. The collection’s intention is to inspire communal connection through gatherings, while deepening artistic interest in the sprightly contributions of Blackness to design, objects, and architectural glassblowing. Encompassing light, color, movement and form, the functional glass items are meditative propagations of creative design intended to express Small Matter’s design language in a line of signature objects for home. Saint Heron’s design studio and gallery, Small Matter, explores sculptural and architectural vigor within a range of signature works for commerce. Small Matter’s design language represents Saint Heron’s uninhibited innovation and ethos through small-scale functional sculptures, architectural objects and design collections. The collection crystallizes Saint Heron’s composed response to our own meticulous interrogations — of space, of community, of self — as aesthetic-forward incarnations of traditional, experimental and intuition-led processes in small-scale object creation.
Saint Heron: Over the past few years, you have been in a place of observing the transformation of light through performance, sculpture, and space making. After observing the decanters over time, can you talk about how light and color shift what’s inside them, and how perception shapes what we think we’re seeing?
Solange Knowles: Light has always been very central to my work, no matter the medium. My mother named me “Sol-Ange,” which translates to an angel of the sun, and so the experience of light as a living embodiment of how I experience the miracle of life—getting to see the sun rise every day and the grace of a new day—permeates and extends to all facets of my life. These decanters were designed to interact with light to create prisms, and light reflections and shadows, and to really experience light as performance. In my continuation of exploring glass as a material, I felt really called to play with the idea of designing with glass as both a functional solid and hollow form, and how that shifts and changes the way that light interacts with the object.
SH: This collection highlights processes like aeration and reflection which are often unseen. What draws you to making unseen transformations perceptible?
SK: I've experienced so much transformation in my lifetime, be it through different stages of my life, different places of being, physical space, emotional space, transitioning through different parts of my work—the transformation from musical artist to designer to programmer. All of these different facets of expression—that transformation is a continuous byline throughout my lifetime that deserves a lot of attention. And so, when I'm thinking about glass and I'm thinking about its transformation from sand to object, I'm thinking about all of the nuance of transformation that takes it through all of those steps and stages as an allegory for my life. I think that glassware expresses something that I can't express with my voice, through dance, or even through writing. I think of that transformation as a mode of survival. Through glass making, you have such a short window to get it “right,” to freeze a moment or a thought into time, and through the process you realize that the process is the work. All of the elements I wanted to bring into the decanter—beauty, poetry, geometry, futurism—but still grounding it in a material that comes from the earth. I wanted to play with my continued love and curiosity about space, gravity, the moon, the sphere, Jupiter, and celestial bodies. Growing up in Houston, I’ve also felt connected to spaceflights, and I think there's a subtlety of all of those elements I was calling from in the design voice of these forms.
SH: Do you think of the act of pouring or transferring liquid as part of the artwork itself? Because I sense a ritualistic essence in decanting. Do you think about how people move with them, pause with them, share them?
SK: Definitely. I remember reading a book on meditation about bringing mundane daily acts into a meditative practice—like eating and drinking—and thinking about where ingredients come from: the rain, the soil, the hands that harvest. When I think about the act of decanting, it takes that even further. I hope the decanter becomes a centerpiece—a portal—something that, when everyone touches it, they are transmitting a spirit of energy through. I designed these as sculptures first—yes, functional, that can aerate—but there are no rules to what these can be used to pour. There is ritual in pouring a glass of water and never taking for granted the source. As an artist, I am not so invested in the act of decanting as I am in the ritual of observing a liquid, the performance in the pour of a liquid, and the fact that a sacred object can carry memory across generations. I hope these stay in families for centuries.
SH: As a designer working with material and meaning, what did Decanters 001 teach you that you want to carry forward?
SK: To trust your ideas, but also accept that God might have different answers. I started with three forms in mind and ended up with fifty unique individual ones. With the glassware, I was really just a beginner in learning about how to take this sand and this fire and turn it into something tangible. I got to watch so much of that process in the hot shop, but I still had a lot of mystery about scaling up and what it meant to sort of take something from embryo into something much more large-scale. The amount of glass it required and how that weight shifted functionality. I remember sitting with Jason on day two of the project and expressing my fears that this might be harder than we thought, and it turns out there were a lot of challenges that made it very difficult to replicate those three forms true to scale and proportion each time. And so one of the beautiful things that came out of this is we did a lot of practice runs on smaller iterations of the forms. And then I learned that that became the work itself, because seeing all of the different distinctions of the form birthed different iterations and design details within the form that expanded the idea. It was quickly revealed to me that that was where the magic lived. Experiencing them as a collection really enlightened me on the distinctive voices they all had. It taught me about having a plan and being vulnerable enough to let it go. Sometimes a different truth emerges—one that’s more important for your growth. Looking back, that shift made the project more interesting, sacred, and meaningful than what I initially envisioned.
