Stained glass for contemplative environments.
Yorkminster Park Baptist Church, Toronto, ON 2019
15’ h. x 20’ w. Hand-made sheet glass, acid-etched, painted, stained, leaded.
The elemental moment of the interaction and separation of darkness and light inspires this west-facing design. Sweeping lines and forms in blue, yellow and red are accented by rhythmic insertions of beveled squares of glass. Overall, the design celebrates beauty and colour, animated by light.
Sisters of Providence, Montreal, QC. A backlit wall of 9 glass panels uses the idea of a pebble being dropped into a pond as its foundation concept. That one simple act has broad and ever-widening effect, echoing the Sisters' philosophy.
Lady’s Chapel, Royal St. George’s College, Toronto, ON
Hand-made glass, fused glass, acid-etched, painted, leaded.
2 angels, ‘beings of light’, are rendered primarily in fused glass. Their wing and garment shapes blend and blur together to suggest the movement of their wings. They play musical instruments, a reference to the school’s long tradition in choral music.
Royal St. George's College chapel, Toronto, ON. A former Anglican church, this chapel is now part of a private boys school campus. The original plans for the building included a rose window for the west entryway. We used an historical watercolour sketch to incorporate that motif into the design.
Trinity Anglican Church, Bradford, ON.
Three windows are designed to celebrate one mother's life. Faith and hope, contained within organized columns of blue and green, bracket the central 'love' window. Love radiates beyond the window's edge to encompass all.
Acid-etched, painted glass; leaded
Glass and light combine to create contemplative environments for hospitals, care facilities, respite centres and other spaces for healing.
Cardinal funeral home, Toronto. An entryway window uses abstract imagery and gradated colours to create an uplifting, non-denominational design.
Designed for the meditation room of RM House, a facility for families of seriously ill children in Toronto, ON. The design uses forms and colour to reference natural elements and to create a quietly engaging environment.
Meeting room window for Gilda's Club, a facility for cancer patients and their families. The window radiates coloured pools of light into the space. Lines of energy sweep around the design, blending form and colour to create a feeling of joy and optimism.
Headwaters Health Care Centre, Orangeville, ON. Intensive Care Unit. Sandblasted glass creates privacy in the lower areas of the window while allowing a view to the outside rural landscape in the upper sections. Colourful fused glass squares complete the design.
Jane and Kathryn Irwin create modern, up-to-date glass designs that use a blend of traditional techniques and contemporary design ideas. See how an Art Zone design changes your 'before' into an 'after'.
A window for a home near Georgian Bay, ON. Textured fused and colourless glass allow light while providing privacy.
5 panels of printed glass, @ 22” w. x 62” h. Custom metal and wood framing.
A watercolour painting was approved for digital scanning and printing. Colours, texture and details from the original painting were all preserved.
Fused glass, leaded.
The client’s passion for Indian culture inspired this design that uses a fused glass motif to reference textiles and architecture. The window provides a pop of colour in an otherwise neutral master bedroom environment.
Situated in the hallway of an original Arts and Crafts home, the armoire features fused glass that combines geometry with loose details of texture.
This design uses colours, shapes and textures to evoke the land and sea of Prince Edward Island.
The door to a child's bedroom incorporates pressed glass airplanes and birds. The large glass panel allows light from the bedroom into the hall, while providing privacy through the use of textured glass.
Textured clear, fused, acid-etched, sandblasted glasses; leaded
Designed for a stairway to provide privacy while allowing light to be maximized, this design uses colourless glass throughout. Various techniques create different transparencies; a structured geometric background is interrupted by lines that blow through the design, scattering the Matisse inspired leaf cut-out shapes.
Lobbies, entryways and feature walls are all perfect sites for glass artworks.
A backlit wall of glass behind a concierge desk
Artwork for public environments
Loosely based on old maps of Toronto, this design uses lazer-etched mirror and coloured resin to create a 4 panel glass installation atop a streetcar shelter on St. Clair Avenue West.
Another proposal for the St. Clair Avenue West project.
Model for Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto. This proposal was one of 3 submissions chosen from a field of 58 shortlisted for a public art project for the Gateway building of CAMH. Panels of laser-etched mirror are bracketed by glass panels of pure colour, creating a gentle arc of gradating colour and imagery that speaks honestly to the theme of 'transforming lives'.
Stained glass in schools adds colour and vitality to meeting areas, as well as providing an opportunity for legacy.
Ketchum Hall, Toronto, ON. Four windows in a redesigned Great Hall use banners of colour to create rhythm across the west wall. Painted details of leaves and branches relate to a school theme, while painted information from the school's photographic archives embeds historical moments into the windows.
A flock of hand-made fused and slumped glass “birds” is situated in a newly renovated mid-town Arts and Crafts home. Natural light animates the forms during the day, bringing the outside in. At night, coloured shadows are cast on the wall by the lights in the ceiling, creating a whole different experience.
A new concept for wall-mounted glass, these fused and slumped “birds” are arranged in flocks, energizing the space with colour and motion.
This is another installation of fused and slumped birds, this time high on the wall of the great room at a cottage. The birds seem to have flown in from outside on their way to the bedrooms upstairs.
Seen from the upstairs hallway, wings stand off the wall dramatically.
These slumped and painted forms could be butterflies or birds.
Situated high on the wall above the reception desk in the office of a Construction Management firm, this composition is made up of 10 reverse-painted fused glass squares, each measuring 20” x 20”. The circle-in- a-square theme is repeated in each piece, with no 2 pieces the same. The glass is mounted on wood cradles that stand off the wall at 2”, 4” and 6”, giving the impression of floating. The effect is clean and contemporary. Spanning an area of 8’ x 13’, the artwork on the feature wall makes an impressive overall statement.
“Suspensions” is a series of wall-mounted sculptures that continues a theme seen in previous work. Without any other mechanical fasteners, fused and slumped glass arms support and cradle intense jewel-coloured mouth blown rondels. Sculpting with light, intriguing overlapping shadows and coloured projections become ethereal extensions of the fundamental structures.
“Currents”, a wall-mounted fused glass installation evocative of blowing leaves, or a school of fish, carries the eye in playful leaps.
Overlapping fused glass on custom made aluminum hardware create the impression of a swirling whirlpool.
An east-facing window, high on the wall in a beautifully renovated family room overlooking the Humber River, is the setting for this custom-made glass artwork. As a feature seen from many vantage points, the fused glass art piece has the appearance of an illuminated water colour painting.
Using a palette of warm browns and greys, sea-foam green and rosy rusts, the composition combines a loose geometry reminiscent of an aerial map, overlaid with an Art Deco Queen Anne’s lace motif in raised relief.
The textured surface captures ambient light, creating a different aspect to the window at night. Painted details sandwiched between the layers of overlapping coloured glass add depth and the suggestion of leaf shadows.
“Time Machine” is a sculpture based on the astrolabe, and ancient navigational instrument. The fused glass disc is a portal into the future- the artist’s version of a crystal ball.
A red blown glass ball is an old-fashioned fishing net float that washed up on a beach in Grenada. The fused and slumped glass pieces fit together to crate a safe place for the ball in the centre. The impression is of an alien life form, blending organic and mechanical references.
The blue blown glass ball is an old-fashioned fishing net float that washed up on a beach in Grenada. The pieces of the sculpture fit together like a puzzle, without fasteners. The ball is suspended in a void, and the pieces of glass that were removed to create the void form the ribs of the fossil.
Two pieces of fused, enamelled and slumped glass fit together in numerous configurations. The forms were derived from folded paper.
