This week the Sarjeant Happenings column is looking for your help.
Have you seen these doors? With their sleek, frosted-glass designs bearing everything from ballerinas to palm trees, they are a familiar sight around the city. Their history, on the other hand, is unknown to most people.
We are masters students of Museum and Heritage Practice from Victoria University of Wellington and are working with the Sarjeant Gallery to unearth and share the history of these special glass panels. Manufactured locally by the Wanganui Glass Company from about 1930, doors, windows and mirrors bearing these designs are a lost piece of Whanganui's design and manufacturing heritage.
The doors, windows and mirrors feature intricate and unique frosted designs with a raised, tactile texture on the reverse. They are rich in detail, and the expertise involved in their design and manufacture is clear at first glance. They feature intricate deco borders, house numbers and emblems, as well as images of playing nymphs, soaring herons and even underwater scenes. A public example featuring the Whanganui District Council coat of arms can be found at the entrance to the Royal Whanganui Opera House.
The doors were created using a complex and painstaking process called sandblasting, in which a sheet of glass was progressively roughened or smoothed to produce shapes, shadows and highlights. While sandblasting is used in many industries today to create finishes on metals, it is rarely used on glass due to the time-intensive and technically demanding process. Recognisable for its elegant designs, the Wanganui Glass Company was known as a master of this technique.
