A window into the soul of Ballard's collector | Arts & Culture

Ballard artist David Chatt grew up with a pet crow.

“They’re not lofty animals, but they’re very bright animals,” he said.

The childhood pet has flitted in and out of Chatt’s professional and personal life ever sense.

Like a crow gathers leaves and twigs for its nest, Chatt collects items. He has collections of bowling balls and step ladders. The exterior of his home, a converted church now known as The Big House, is decorated with a collection of tricycles. Even Chatt’s most well-known artwork – thousands of tiny glass beads sewn together into shapes – is a form of collecting.

Now, Chatt is working on The Collector, his most ambitious tribute to his life’s spirit animal yet. The Collector is a one-ton window that will replace the Big House’s 16-foot-tall Gothic window.

Chatt and his partner Ron took over the former Bethany Baptist/Chinese Evangelical/Church of Divine Man church on the corner of Northwest 61st Street and 20th Avenue Northwest five years ago. Around the same time, the Bellevue Art Museum hosted a one-man show spanning 20 years of Chatt’s beadwork.

The museum had this to say about Chatt and his work: “Like a crazy person, he is attracted to the intricate, some would say obsessive-compulsive, nature of bead working. The painstaking process of sewing thousands of tiny glass beads one to the next is one that cannot be hurried.”

While looking around at a room containing two decades of his life, Chatt said he wondered how he wanted to fill the room in the next 20 years and thought why not do something completely different.

He was awarded an artist in residence position at the Penland School of Crafts in 2008, moved to North Carolina and built his own glass studio. He spent the majority of his residence practicing and learning a new trade in preparation for one final ambitious project – 200 separate pieces of glass that will be fused into a single window depicting a crow atop a nest of abstracted sticks.

Making the switch from beadwork, which could largely be done while sitting in an easy chair, to a craft that requires working with lots of glass, people, equipment and money has been quite a change a of pace for Chatt.

“I don’t know how you can get more different,” Chatt said. “This is a very physical process. It takes a little bit to get your head around it.”

The new window will be a fitting addition to the Big House, which Chatt describes as a receptacle for his strange collections, with the crow as a talisman of that. But with such a prominent location, the window will become not only a part of his house but a part of the surrounding neighborhood, he said.

For the past five years, the Big House has hosted weddings, birthday parties, spelling bees, community meetings, performances, junk sales, Christmas parties and more.

“My house has been a community gathering place for over a century, and it continues to be,” Chatt wrote on a fundraising page for The Collector. “People love my house. This window will go a long way toward saving this iconic structure and assuring that it continues its role as a collector of people, experiences and memories.”

Chatt plans to fire the glass next month. He will return to Ballard when his residency ends in April and hopes to have The Collector installed in early summer.

Chatt is raising money online through Jan. 29 for the new window. He said he wants to encourage anyone who is interested in the project or in supporting a community space to donate. Gifts for donations include artwork and the use of the Big House for an event.