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The history of stained glass is one of veneration. Since the Medieval period, craftsmen have cut, coloured and soldered together images of the heavens, which invoke wonder when illuminated by the transitionary light of the sun. This complex art was the sole preserve of religious spaces for hundreds of years – where sticks, needles and quills were used to articulate the faces of angels and saints – and, even now, the artform remains synonymous with spirituality.
However, change is afoot. Now, it has captured the imaginations of contemporary artists, who want to push the medium beyond the roles it plays within religious spaces. By both alluding to and exploding the roots of this ecclesiastical artform, entirely new possibilities are presenting themselves – from integrated architectural spaces to free-standing sculptures.
For Jonathan Michael Ray, a multidisciplinary artist based in Cornwall, it was church window restoration that initially sparked his interest – in particular, the fragmentary aspect of the work. Broken panes might be filled in with salvaged pieces brought from elsewhere, or simply supplemented with less enigmatic plain glass. ‘There is often a make do and mend approach,’ he says, ‘but no one really wants to draw attention to them. These repairs aren’t what people are supposed to focus on.’ This sense of surreptitious collage-making encouraged the artist to start looking for his own scraps. He trawled junk yards and online auction sites like Ebay, collecting pieces that might have origins in a Victorian doorway or a church roundel, and started compiling them into entirely new forms.
The results are striking assemblages that completely reimagine the visual language of Christian worship: beatific hands are spun on their axis, tesselated around snatches of Gothic text or architectural finials. In some pieces, such as The Chapel (2022), the natural curves of the original artistry are honoured. Elsewhere, the artist deftly slices the panes into sharp diagonals, creating something akin to a sacred kaleidoscope. His work was recently on display at Bo Lee and Workman gallery in the Somerset village of Bruton. The building’s previous life as a Methodist church could not be more apt a setting for Ray’s work – particularly as its own original window, depicting St Matthew, looms high above these contemporary reincarnations.
As far as Ray is concerned, the physical quality of the glass is just as significant as the depictions it holds. There is thickness, texture and transparency, all of which adds to the fictional narratives he builds through his careful rearrangements. ‘There’s so much history in these fragments, and they’re so beautiful,’ he says. ‘I almost feel like a fraud working with such stunning source material.’
Reconceptualising the visual history of stained glass, and, through it, the notion of who is adored, has also led the fêted American artist Kehinde Wiley to experiment with the form. Best known for painting the presidential portrait of Barack Obama, the artist focuses on redefining the art historical canon by situating contemporary Black Americans within it. Over the last decade, Wiley has created a series of stained glass windows in which the saints are supplanted by living, breathing Brooklynites. In 2021, his work Saint Adelaide (2014), which sees a 19th-century commission by Ingres reimagined as young man named Mark Shavers wearing jeans and trainers, entered the Museum of Stained Glass at Ely Cathedral.
The sensibility of artist Brian Clarke is altogether different. He has been a giant in the world of stained glass artistry for decades, having learned the craft as a student in North Devon. In spite of his schooling in the medium’s majesty from an Anglican vicar, the artist’s goal is ‘to do as much as possible to dispel the idea that stained glass is limited to the expression of ecclesiastical iconography’.
The breadth of his practice attests to the artist’s commitment to his mission. His pieces currently fill London’s Newport Street Gallery, with several reaching a colossal scale. Ardath (2023), for example, is 42sq m of mouth-blown glass depicting a richly pigmented meadow – a work which slips between the graphic sensibilities of collage and the stunning fluidity of the formerly molten material. Another piece, The Stroud Ossuary (2023), is an enormous composite window intended for a 16th-century yeoman’s house in Gloucestershire. The hanging collection of 21 panels layers together rows of human skulls, all produced using Ben Day dots; an effect usually reserved – excepting its use by Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein – for commercial printing. It’s a mechanical method undercut by the swirling gradient of rainbow colour that infuses every pane, the two harmonised by means of the subtle translucency that only this medium can offer. ‘There are certain things you can express through stained glass that you cannot even begin to express as a painter or as a sculptor,’ says Clarke. ‘It’s a poetic world of experience.’
Margate-based artist Lindsey Mendick, meanwhile, is known for her ceramics, which span more conventional vessels and enveloping, confessional installations – but the properties of stained glass have always fascinated her. She recalls visiting the All Saints’ church in Tudeley, and marvelling at its 12 windows designed by Russian-French Modernist Marc Chagall. His palette of cobalts, violets and aquamarines feels like something out of a dream, casting everything within an otherworldly hue. ‘We all talk about art being immersive, but stained glass truly is,’ says Mendick. ‘You are bathed in the whole image, and you become part of it as the light shines through. There’s a transaction between the viewer and the work.’
Her first foray into the medium was a series of light-boxes that celebrate history’s misunderstood and villainised women, from Anne Boleyn to Princess Diana. In coopting the aesthetic language used to revere saints and holy figures, she asks her audience to question how and why individuals should be praised. Despite her love for the effects of the artform, Mendick admits that she is not adept at making these pieces herself. ‘I did a one-day course and I hated it,’ she says. ‘I suppose because it’s the complete antithesis of clay, in how immediate and visceral it is.’
Instead, she began working with a stained glass artist Claire Orme. Their collaborations include the teeming one-room show Where the Bodies are Buried, currently on at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This vibrant exhibition is a veritable cavalcade of millennial references, underpinned by an ongoing murder plot on the soap opera Brookside. Two ‘buried’ bodies, illuminated from below, appear under pulled-up floorboards, their sinews articulated in delicate slices. Elsewhere, oversized ceramic flies are adorned with delicate glass wings, rendering the pests strangely beautiful: for Orme, this new venture into three-dimensional sculpture meant being able to harness the spectacular qualities of the medium in a new way. ‘There is an atmosphere that it creates, which has long inspired artists. There is so much potential for thinking outside the box and interpreting its qualities in different ways,’ she says.
Her skills will be put to the test in the run-up to Mendick’s upcoming exhibition at Jupiter Artland this summer, which is set to explore the social morality of heavy drinking, specifically as it concerns women. A space that is promised to resemble a club bathroom, a condom machine and tampon dispensary will be given the stained-glass treatment, radiating the most unholy glow one could imagine. A world away from the windows that adorn our religious spaces, to be sure, but defining proof that the possibilities of this hitherto conventional medium have yet to be fully unleashed.
‘The Voice in the Shadow’ runs at Bo Lee and Workman gallery until 24 June. Details: boleeworkman.com/exhibitions
