The Fishers’ Window

A congregation of about forty people raised the money for this window over eleven years, mostly in tens and twenties, and there is a particular kind of pressure that comes with that. Nobody on the committee had commissioned anything before. What they knew was the harbour, and what they asked for — in the first meeting, before we had drawn a line — was that it should not look like a picture of the harbour.

So we gave them a horizon. One lead line, level, straight through all three lights at the height of the sill outside, so that on a clear day the lead in the window and the sea beyond it are at the same level and the eye cannot separate them. Above it: weather. Below it: water. That is the whole scheme, and it took four months of drawing to get to something that simple.

Reamy, laid the wrong way

Reamy glass has striations rolled into it. Glazed the way the sheet wants to be glazed, with the reams vertical, it reads as rain on a pane — which is beautiful, and wrong for this window. Turned ninety degrees it becomes swell. It is the single most effective thing in the window and it cost nothing but the nerve to cut across the sheet and waste more of it.

The names

Panel 19 carries eighteen names of people lost off this coast between 1911 and 1979. The lettering is copied from the harbour master’s ledger rather than set in a typeface, which means it is uneven, and the unevenness is the point. It was fired twice: once for the trace, once for a very thin matt laid over the whole panel and stippled back, so the letters sit in the glass rather than on it.