history of snow globes | Camryn Forrest Designs

Now and then in our travels on the internet, we find interesting documents about snow globes.

Bonus: this document, a Masters thesis, is about the history of snow globes, and includes a paragraph or so about Camryn Forrest Designs. We’re honored to be included.

A BIOGRAPHY OF THE AMERICAN SNOW GLOBE: FROM MEMORY TO MASS PRODUCTION, FROM SOUVENIR TO SIGN, by Anne Hilker

Here’s an excerpt from the thesis:

“Camryn Forrest, a self-described snow globe “artist,” uses the globe’s original theme of delight and intrigue: working in a genre called “steampunk,” she encases in her globes fantasy objects appearing to be powered by steam and built with ironclad soldered parts.

Doubling back both to nostalgia for an early industrialized, rather than technological, ethos, as well as to the Victorian origins of the globe, the tableaux inside contain machines and figures that have no real – world counterparts, past or present. When the tiny shapes of human figures do appear, their function is to give relative scale to the gigantic machines: they are featureless mannequins, posed in positions that defy gravity …”

To read the rest of Hilker’s work, follow the link.

https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/27478/HILKERTHESIS5.23.pdf

“Point of View” an Escher-inspired snow globe, design and images copyright (2012, 2016) Camryn Forrest Designs, Denver, Colorado, USA.

It’s a big honor to have our snow globes displayed in a museum!

Five unique snow globes created by Camryn Forrest Designs are on display for the rest of November and all of December as part of the “Celebrating Snow Globes” exhibit at the Sandwich Glass Museum in Sandwich, Mass. This is about an hour’s drive from Boston, or an hour’s drive from Providence. If you go there, you’ll see an entire collection of snow globes, both antique and modern.

Here’s what is on display from Camryn Forrest Designs:

Airship Voyager, Uncharted Skies, Sacramento Steampunk Society snow globe (courtesy Collection of Doug Hack), Ray Gun One, and Circular Logic snow globes.