Shaping the Light

Sarah Hall, the dynamo who designed the stained glass panel entitled More Red Than Blue, has created fifty such domestic-scaled panels over the past year. She is best known, however, for her liturgical and corporate stained glass installations, which she has been producing intensively during the past decade of her twenty-year career.

In her light-filled studio with 28 foot-high ceilings in Toronto's west end, Hall does all of the designing and much of the painting, while her assistant William Lindsay glazes, fires and works on leading and assembling the glass panels. Larger scale and overflow projects are completed by partnering studios, including the Sattler Studio, Nova Scotia, and the Derix Glas Studios, Germany.

Collaboration is a necessity when completing large architectural commissions such as the ten major windows recently installed in a church in Dublin, Ohio; the just-completed windows for a synagogue in Montclair, New Jersey; and a new window for the historic Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan that was designed to complement its precious Louis Comfort Tiffany windows.

What are the secrets of Hall's impressive success in getting large international commissions? "Winning awards helps," acknowledges the artist, who was recognized in 1996 by the Ontario Association of Architects for her contribution to the built environment. But most of all, her mammoth 3,000 square foot wall of windows in St. Andrew Church in Columbus, Ohio has put her on the map. Hall laughs, "The size of the project was something my American colleagues responded to - and the fact that a Canadian got it!"

Hall's low-key but precise demeanour gives her the air of a first-rate teacher. Indeed, education is an ongoing part of what she does. To assist community groups, in 1999 she published The Colour of Light, a resource book outlining the techniques and history of stained glass and the role of the client in the commissioning process. "My job is to find a visual expression of who they are as a community and to lend a poetic relationship with the building or site," says Hall.

In addition to the usual challenges of public art, introducing contemporary iconography in ecclesiastical contexts can be particularly difficult. Hall's fondest wish is that "churches be moved out of their nostalgic positions:' That said, Hall sees herself very much in an artistic continuum that stretches back a thousand years. As she's designing, she often makes mental reference to historic windows, tapping into the transcendent spirit of those great works.

Hall fell in love with the way stained glass transforms spaces at the tender age of nine, when she toured a number of churches with her father who was on a building committee. To this day, the transmuting quality of light is paramount. "Stained glass can provide a beautiful, serene, other-worldly place of shelter and repose," says Hall. "Light doesn't have to be striking or dramatic to make us feel differently about ourselves."