View BBC Sheffield radio and tv page for St Luke

Following interviews on 29th October, BBC Sheffield and South Yorkshire did a great page of presentation of the windows.

Press release and photocall

THE ART HOUSE / ST. LUKE’S CHURCH GRIMETHORPE

PRESS RELEASE AND PHOTOCALL on 29 October, 2009

GRIMETHORPE MUM IS MADONNA IN NEW WINDOWS

Members of the congregation of St. Luke’s Church, Grimethorpe, have been immortalised in new windows created by glass artist Nathalie Liege.

Sarah Crawshaw and her son, Lee, are featured as St. Mary and the baby Jesus, while the Vicar, Father Peter Needham, Nathalie and congregation members Audrey Bailey and Peter Squires also feature in the windows.

The idea for the windows grew out of a project instigated in 2003 by The Art House, a visual arts organisation based in Wakefield.  Glass artist Nathalie Liege, who lives in Shrewsbury, won a commission to work with the congregation at St. Luke’s to develop ideas for the refurbishment of the Church.  In a series of workshops Nathalie photographed members of the congregation in a variety of poses and later developed the design for the two Lady Chapel windows from these photographs.

It took a further three years for Father Peter to raise the money to fund the production of the windows, with much of the £47,000 budget coming from an Arts Council England Awards for All grant.  Further fundraising was undertaken by the Mothers’ Union and a grant from the Co-operative Community Fund went towards associated workshops with children at two Grimethorpe schools: Milefield and Willowgarth.

The windows are not made of traditional lead and glass stained glass but use a series of ground-breaking new methods.

Firstly Nathalie worked in clay, using the photographs as reference, and created the iconic image of the Madonna and Child in low relief.  The clay image is then used to make a rubber mould which, in turn, is used to cast the glass for the windows.

The second method involved Nathalie working with David Huson of the University of the West of England in Bristol, an expert in digital fabrication.  The figures on either side of the cross are created using moulds formed directly from Nathalie’s photographs utilising software designed to produce high definition reliefs by controlling a high-tech milling machine.  The glass used for the panels can be selected and mixed from a range of colours.

Finally, the photographic images were made using a process from Norway.   The photographs are made into coloured transfers, which are made in a special Xerox system in four colours.  The transfers are placed between layers of glass and fired.  Nathalie worked with glass craftsman Detlef Tanz, based in Germany, researching methods to create depth and 3-dimensional effect.  In the melting process the transfers are fused to the glass and become part of it, giving photographs in glass.

continued ….

St. Luke’s Windows … 2

Having worked with experts nationally and internationally to apply these processes to her artwork, Nathalie believes that the windows are unique in the UK in using these cutting-edge and innovative processes all together.

Nathalie was thrilled to be able to produce windows showing the Virgin Mary, “The windows are for the Virgin Mary, which makes the windows really special for an artist working in the 21st century.  Most churches already have their window for the Virgin Mary and as architectural glass artists we are once in a life time asked to work with such a subject.”

The commissioning of innovative and high-quality artwork underlies Father Peter’s approach to the continuing refurbishment of St. Luke’s.

“I want to bring the best of things to people in Grimethorpe” explains Father Peter.  “It is important that people in Grimethorpe understand that they are as deserving of good things as anyone else.”

“St Luke’s Parish Church is in the very centre of the village and was built in 1904 ‘by the miners, for the miners’.  With the decline of the coal industry, and the final closure of the pit, coking plant and power station in 1993, the church, like the rest of the village experienced deep degeneration.  By 2001, the church community came to a decision to demolish the parish church.  In 2002, this decision was reversed with vigour, with the view that the parish church was, and is, the spiritual heart of the Grimethorpe community, holding those spiritual and divine attributes of quality, worth and value, which are not just found in a church building, but in every human soul. The re-ordering and saving of St Luke’s was therefore vital in presenting to all the people of the community something that all could be proud of.”

Father Peter explains: “The Liege windows offer to the whole community a work of art that people can have pride in. They are not the average Church glass windows, rather images you can continue to look in and through, and constantly find something new. The fact that the images in the windows are based on members of the Grimethorpe community who were involved in their development, at the start, means that this work of art is truly alive, inspired by the people, for the people – the People of God.”

“This has been a brilliant project from start to finish” said Liz Whitehouse, Director of The Art House, who managed the project on behalf of St. Luke’s. “This project worked so closely with the congregation that they are actually featured in the artwork.  The workshops with the two schools, conducted by artist Alison Brearley, also involved children from Grimethorpe and they produced their own ideas for windows, made in clay tiles, and these are also on show in the Church alongside Nathalie’s stunning new windows.”

Karen Durham, Resource Development Officer, Arts Council England, Yorkshire, said “We are really excited that our lottery funding is supporting  artistic activities in Grimethorpe, enriching the lives of the people who live there and giving them a sense of pride in their community. This high quality and

continued…

St. Luke’s Windows … 3

innovative new artwork in St Luke’s Church represents a new approach to the creation of architectural glass, which will be enjoyed by the community for years to come.”

Photo Opportunity

On Thursday, 29 October, between 11 a.m. and 12.30 p.m., the artist Nathalie Liege and people featured in the windows will be available for photographs/interview at St. Luke’s Church, Grimethorpe.

For further information please contact:

Father Peter Needham, Vicar of St. Luke’s Church, Grimethorpe on

01226 717561

Or

Liz Whitehouse, Director, The Art House on 01924 377740 / 0790 3821791

Email: lizwhitehouse@the-arthouse.org.uk

See more of Nathalie Liege’s work at http://saintlukesmary.wordpress.com

talk Thursday 29th October 2009

I will be speaking about creating St Luke’s Church architectural glass artwork for the Chapel of The Virgin Mary , from concept to completion.

Join us at 6pm at The Art House, Drury Lane, Wakefield, WF1 2TE

info@the-arthouse.org.uk

Conservation and Painting

I finished a three days course in York . I attended a glass-painting master-class at the Department of History of Art, at the University of York. I had the great joy to discover a painting at the York Art Gallery:

Paul Nash Winter Sea.

I purchased the book written about that painting:

Winter Sea, the development of an image, an enqury by Leonard Robinson.

His work reminded me of Kupka.

New Blog address for St Luke’s windows

The windows are fitted and we now have at the following address http://saintlukesmary.wordpress.com the previous transfered blog written while we made the windows ( http://nlglass.blogspot.com ) and a new version for people to write comments via internet once they viewed the artwork on site or with photographs.

St Luke’s windows

After the April journey to Germany had to be postponed, I am now about to travel there and hopefully complete the artwork for the windows to be installed by Barley Studio very soon.

Update of my website

I have updated my Eco Vista and Lay on the ground Galleries and the Art-s section, including  new photography Galleries. You’ll find new photographs.

I am also working at completing the French version of the website. Very soon, you will have the choice of the language in the home page.

Exhibition

at Cath Tate Card Shop

37 Hills Lane, Shrewsbury_opening hours are 10-5 Monday to Saturday

Lay on the ground & Eco Vistas

photographs by Nathalie Liège

exhibition between the 20th and 27th June 2009 at shop opening times

A small article for Deutsche Kichengemeinde in Nord-England

After my day in Manchester and the talk about St Stephen Marc Chagall’s windows in Martin-Luther Kiche, I agreed to write a small article for their Gemeindebrief ( newsletter). It will be translated in German:

Manchester talk on 7th March  about Marc Chagall’s windows of St Stephen Church in Mainz in Germany was of great interest for me as a professional artist and architectural glass designer/maker. Marc Chagall had said ” For me a church window represents the transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world” (p243 Marc Chagall by Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Taschen,2003). The light was also in his heart as a painter and he worked with ease with the light and colour to create paintings with glass and on glass. He had been taught the glass painting technique in his 60 s and worked for over 35 years at various stained glass commissions until his death in 1985.

Photos of the artworks for those windows are rarely presented in books about his work ( the Taschen book written by his friend Jacob Baal-Teshuva do not present those windows ). It was an other motivation to view a slide show of this artwork in the Martin-Luther-Kirche in Manchester and a pleasant surprise to see that Pastor Strobel also had the books about those windows written in German by Klaus Mayer. The windows were taller than any other stained glass windows Marc Chagall had done.

It was very interesting to view how he aesthetically dealt with it. His artwork as a painter has all the potentials for technically making stained glass windows. Colours are plain, one next to the other like two panes of two coloured glass red and blue bonded by lead lines ( one character dressed with one colour, an other one next to it dressed  with an other  colour).The colour scheme of primary or secondary colours or the vibration for each colour can be achieved with glass and by the use of etching flashed red or blue or green glass gain variations in tones and hues. His use of gold yellow is rendered by the use of silver stain on clear parts of the glass. All outer lines of his characters’ bodies or faces needed no alterations for painting on glass with traditional brown glass paintings. Not only the colours, but also the lead lines were not like breaking into patches his design, as his artwork as a painter has its own rhythm of lines and structure of divisions of the space behind and within the body of all characters.

Those windows are the achievement of his understanding of the bond between his artwork and light, stained glass techniques and aesthetic openness of that craft, more than any other of his stained glass artwork. His use of lead-line has an amazing visual lightness and as viewers, it is entirely taken as lines of the art piece as one.

won’t try a summary

Clearly lots happened since I last typed news. Most of it for St Luke. But also the completion of my new website http://www.nl-art-s.co.uk  took most of my time on the computer.

Am planning some workshops for my own artistic development some time in April and May for illustration and icon painting. Before then, I  start this week with a visit of the Byzantium exhibition in London, followed by a short introduction to Russian Icon painting technique and the following day some contemporary art exhibition.

The Byzantium exhibition will be seen in company of people who has great knowledge of that subject of history. The catalogue is already a great pleasure to read and view.

The Goethe Institut information letters I receive regularly was presenting an other exhibition Medium Relgion  in Karlsruhe. I wish I could visit it. It won’t be over when I will be in Germany to complete the glass artwork for St Luke. It would be worth the effort of the journey, after seeing the exhibition in Paris last summer.

I may also travel to Manchester for a presentation of Chagall stained glass windows in German beginning of March.

An other exhibition I dreamt I ll see: Hans ARP in Strasbourg.

So you may read my feedbacks on those events or exhibitions.

I also had a present from my friend for Christmas: Omega et l’ours signed by Beatrice Alemagna. Great way to finish the year.