Wester Fyne Village Hall · Wester Fyne
Corn and Cormorant
A village hall window paid for by a raffle. Two lights, ninety-one people named in the border, and not one saint in it.
Completed2019
Lights2 lights
Panels12 panels
Glazed area4.0 m²
GlassEnglish Antique Glass, Birmingham
Came9.5 mm H
Firings22
JobNew window
The window
The whole budget was four thousand two hundred pounds, raised by raffle over two years, and the condition attached to it by the committee was that everyone who had bought a book of tickets should be named in the window. Ninety-one people. In a window four metres square.
Four names to a quarry, in silver stain, around the border. It reads as a decorative band from anywhere in the room and as a list of names from about a metre away, which is exactly the right distance for the kind of person who comes to look for their own name.
The bird
The cormorant is one piece of glass. Black streaks through a bottle green, and when we found the sheet the bird was effectively already in it — a matter of turning the pattern over the sheet until the streaks fell where the wing should be. There is no paint on it except a single fired dot for the eye. This is the cheapest and the best thing in the window and it took twenty minutes of the eleven months.
Panel by panel
Border
Ninety-one names, four to a quarry, in silver stain. Everyone who bought a book of tickets.
Panel 6
The cormorant. Cut from one piece of black-streaked glass, no paint on the bird at all except the eye.
Panel 8
Barley. The only place where we used copper foil, because lead could not turn that tightly.
Panel 11
Deliberately left plain. The hall committee wanted somewhere to look when the room is full.
Elsewhere
