Sacred Spaces: Sarah Hall’s Sanctuaries of Glass

Through her monumental stained glass pieces, Sarah Hall transforms spaces into enchanting, mystical places.

The cathedral in Chartres, France, houses some of the world's oldest and best-preserved examples of medieval stained glass. In the minds of its disciples - students of stained glass - the dark spires and massive ramparts loom as some great towering mecca of glass. It comes as no surprise that Toronto stained glass artist Sarah Hall experienced an epiphany while on a pilgrimage to Chartres in 1977. "As soon as I walked into that light, it was like a ship pulled out of a harbor into a completely new world," she says, her blue-grey eyes turning skyward and her small, fine hands coming together as if in prayer. "The contrast of the great mass and the dark made the colored glass glow so that I lost all sense of time. The whole place seemed to flow through history."

After that revelation, there was no turning back. As one of Canada's leading stained glass artists, Hall has made it her lifes work to re-create the magic of Chartres in the places that house her work. She calls these places sacred spaces. "So many places can hold you down," she explains. "We need places where we can explore history and discover how we fit in the big picture."

Hall's commissioned pieces have found sacred places in a constellation of churches, schools and hospitals, and more recently in Torontds Jessie's Centre for Teenagers and Scotia Plaza. She has earned a bevy of awards, and in 1989, she was one of five artists representing Canada in the prestigious 11th Salon International du Vitrail in Chartres, France. Her work, which incorporates a variety of traditional techniques, including leaded glass, acid etching, sandblasting, appliqué, lamination, silver stain painting, gold leafing and reverse painting, is represented in more than 40 private collections and residential commissions, and she has mounted numerous exhibitions both at home and in Europe. "Unlike many other artists who simply look at the glass itself," says art collector and author John McAdam, "Sarah focuses on the whole environment, the quality and movement of light. Hers is a deeply spiritual voyage.

There are always layers and layers of different ideas and glass contours. Thousands of different experiences each time you see the window. I would call what she does sculpting with light."

Hall stands out in the stained glass community for her particular brand of artistic spirituality. She has a personal commitment to the spirit that runs through all her work. She is a Quaker. She prefers austerity and professes a personal abhorrence of commercialism. Favoring the sound of her family's pleasant music making, she once tried to ban recorded music from her home. But her husband, who makes musical instruments and two children eventually, won that battle. As her former Sheridan College teacher Robert Jekyll says, "She has strongly held convictions that she amalgamates with her work. Unlike many other strictly secular artists, she has been able to tap into that traditional connection between stained glass and the church and make it work for her."

But Hall's veneration of traditional liturgical themes, such as the stations of the cross and the ascension are not mere religious stereotyping. Her church commissions may evolve from exhaustive research of the relevant liturgy, but the representations and symbols in her work are all her own. "We're all used to seeing this heavy-handed iconography," says Toronto architect Winston Fritz; "But when Sarah does a Christ, he's not the suffering emaciated Christ we all know. He's a welcoming one, sitting down" comfortably. Sarah researches history and her spirit for the right solution."

A typical example of Hall's unique style is her window, Kyrie Eleison, in the chapel of the Scarborough Catholic Secondary School. In a mixture of figurative and abstract, the two-and-a-half-metre-high window conveys the suffering of the poor of Calcutta and contains symbols of Mother Teresa’s order. Using a series of slides, models and drawings, Hall was able to convince the client committee to accept a more positive scenario instead of one that depicts the traditional suffering Mother Teresa. The result, as project designer Bak Hemniti-Wong puts it, interprets the school's need to achieve "the best fit within the theme and space of the chapel."

Like many of her projects, Kyrie EIeison exemplifies not only Hall's never-erring optimistic spiritual outlook, but also her ability to anticipate, educate and translate the needs of her clients. "She has the rare ability to listen to clients and make the most of the artist-client relationship," says art consultant Ann Mortimer. "Many very talented artists are unable to under- stand how to work within that framework and still produce a piece that’s artistically adventurous."

For Hall, this process is the only one that makes sense. "You must work within sacred spaces if you have a strong spiritual life. But I'm not offering any kind of stereotypes. We've filled our sacred spaces with commercial products - it's a tragedy. We have to reach be- yond that into making things that really mean something in real-life experience." In a contemporary art world that tends to eschew traditional religious spaces, Hall has pushed her sacred space into the present and made it her home. Truth be told - it was her very first home. Hall admits that even as a child she often thought she'd been accidentally placed in the wrong family. And the wrong country. "I never felt quite like 1 was in the right place," she says in her usual quiet monotone, although the memory produces a characteristic wry expression in her eyes. "I used to look at those pictures of England and the old stone fences and I'd think 'What the hell am I doing here!'. But the closest place to England she could find within the boundary of her child-sized world was under the glass-top living-room table. Its old lace table cloth broke the light into mesmerizing patterns that waltzed over her body as she lay under the table. "When I saw and felt how the patterns could transform an atmosphere, it made me feel the experience of the world," she says.

By the time Hall was nine, she found solace inside the serene churches and chapels she visited with her father. As the chairman of a church building committee, he often took Hall along on his architectural fact-finding missions. "From the first moment I saw stained glass," Hall notes with her trademark clenched-fisted certainty, "I decided that’s what I wanted to do."

It didn't prove a simple matter of will. In the early 1960s the accent in glass was on openness and transparency. Most people were installing clear-glass windows in churches. And few stained glass courses existed in Canada. Hall could find nowhere to work on her art. "I was kicked out of a lot of studios by these cussy old German people who didn't want to share their craft."

Hall also suffered from a mild case of the 1960s bohemian travelling itch. And the Toad she chose to follow fulfilled her need for the space between the shadows. In 1969 she landed in Alberta where weekend museum trips sparked a curiosity about ghost towns. For five years, she bushwhacked through old coal-mining villages in the mountains and the badlands searching for abandoned spaces. When she found them she photographed them and eventually landed a contract to document the sites for museums. "I shot how the light flowed through all these spaces. You could feel the history everywhere."

By the mid-1970s Hall had pocketed enough savings to bankroll her first one-year stained glass course at Sheridan College. She then set her sights on the architectural stained glass program at the Swansea College of Art in Wales. "I just knew it was the right place for me," Hall says. "The bombed-out warehouse, the little seaside of Mumbles where I lived, the church windows, the clouds, the drama, the light, it was the best classroom."

By the time she received the coveted} diploma in architectural glass from Swansea in 1977, Hall was already looking for another teacher. She took the shortest path right to the front of the class, to the United Kingdom's glass master at the Royal College of Art, the designer of the windows at Coventry Cathedral - Lawrence Lee. "He went out looking for a place for me to live and turned up a gypsy caravan. Lee had the most wonderful sense of integrity in everything he did," Hall says. "Besides that sense of honesty, I learned from him all the

technical skills needed to work on large scale."

Learning the art of large-scale glasswork has allowed Hall to tackle immense projects such as AllIhat Glitters, a reverse-painted gold-leaf mural that she completed in 1990 for Scotia Plaza. The piece connects 112 square metres of food court and an elevator with a spectacular golden ribbon of scintillating scenes. The effect can best be described as the sun peering through a crack in reality. Hardly your usual corporate joue-joue.

Lee may have imparted his skill with scale, but it was legacies of ancient Islamic glass- makers that first introduced Hall to the technique of reverse painting on glass. Following her exhausting one-year apprenticeship with Lee, Hall embarked on an eight-month tour of Jerusalem. Her interest in Islamic glass and Middle Eastern techniques inspired the trip. "They made extensive use of re- verse painting on glass with gold leaf," she says. "It ani-mated the glass with a whole new dimension."

The trip through Jerusalem's glass temples also prompted ideas for mosaic work that Hall is now considering incorporating into her work. However inspirational, the whole crusade left her in a state she likens to cultural exhaustion. She came back to Canada in 1979 looking for three simple psychic elixirs - physical space, a feeling of being at home and a chance to do her own work. She was 28 and ready to carve out her own artistic space.

And hers weren't just pie-in-the-sky dreams. While many glassmakers find it difficult to eke out more than a slim living, Hall has built her reverie into a reality that could only be described as sumptuous. There are a number of factors that helped put flesh on the fantasy, most of them propelled by remarkable determination.

Since her return to Toronto in the late 1970s, Hall has developed an ultra-organized working process that rarely misses its mark. She has surrounded herself with a group of supportive and dedicated glass artists. She’s a dogged businesswoman, Her colleagues say the Dupont Street glass studio she shares with six other artists is perhaps one of the best-equipped workshops in the city. This potent mixture has prompted her husband to remark that she's "a great wife, a great mother and a great artist, but never at the same time." But more important than all of this is her will to make it all work. The Sarah Hall recipe for success boils down to this - "I knew what 1 wanted and 1 went out and got it."

Hall's work for Jessie's Centre incorporates all of these ingredients. She spent months working with a collective - hours of research, dozens of photographs, slides, models and blueprints - to come up with a stained glass piece for the nursery. She simply transformed it into a rainbow. The windows are covered in large Crayola-colored geometric shapes embedded with iridescent glass, eyeglass lenses and playful pictures that project candied light all over the room. "The work is clearly a women's world. Enchanting. Full of dignity and respect. Imaginative. Spiritually sensitive," says organizer and writer June Callwood. "Not some old couch in the basement."

Hall admits the project is one of her favorites. She particularly likes the way everything seemed to just fit into place - and her world view. "We are all part of something," she says. "I see us all in some kind of continuum. When I look at what I'm doing as an artist, it's my contribution within a history. I'm making history" like stained glass, Halls life has always been about finding the right pieces and putting them into the places they belong. She has found her home in a house of sacred glass.