Judith Schaechter (American, born 1961)
Beached Whale, 2018

Run Time: 3 minutes 5 seconds
Recorded by Judith Schaechter, artist / February 18, 2021

Hi! I’m Judith Schaechter, an artist working in stained-glass from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I do not consider myself an artist who works in an overtly political matter. Nor do I consider my works to have specific messages. As always, I seek to create works that are open to a variety of interpretations depending on the imagination of the viewer. That said, I am deeply concerned about our world and I see a dire need for empathy and compassion. I am specifically concerned with our environment, climate change, habitat collapse, and the treatment of animals, and Beached Whale was inspired by those feelings and those concerns.

I'm an avid collector of images. I have a rather large folder of beached whale imagery, including news photographs and antique prints going back several hundred years. We had been absolutely mesmerized by beached whales for centuries. There's something incredibly poignant about the death of a creature so much larger and powerful than us humans. It makes us question our own standing in the cosmos. How can something so huge and awe inspiring come to such a sad end? In this piece I wanted to capture some of that fascination, but use it to create a reminder that climate change is real and it is affecting animal habitats and that animals are capable of great suffering, too.

The curtain is there to indicate, like an old game show, that we have a choice between choosing what is behind door number one, door number two, or three. And sometimes we don't know what we're choosing.

Without getting too deep into it, one of the main inspirations for my work is the history of the medium of stained-glass. I'm constantly looking at historical work. Much of my work is inspired by Gothic windows, but Beached Whale, believe it or not, was a nod to Tiffany. The stormy night sky was created by a special piece of one-of-a-kind glass fabricated probably around the early 20th century for the Tiffany-inspired craftsperson. I looked at a lot of glass sheets before selecting just that one.

The entire composition designed to make the whale look especially confined in a tiny, shallow inlet was inspired by American painter, Martin Johnson Heade’s painting of 1859 Approaching Thunderstorm, which is the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It must have been inspired in part by the stormy political pre-Civil war climate as Beached Whale is intended as a warning of impending climate disaster.