Night Window

"Night Window" was a site specific installation, commissioned by the York Renaissance Project as part of a festival of light called Illuminate York.

I collaborated with the artist Vicky Long (Studio Long) and our idea was to create an illuminated moving stained glass window. We identified the site - St Mary’s, a deconsecrated Saxon church in York city centre that had lost it’s original stained glass. The window lead was intact so it created the perfect frame for our film, which we projected outwards for passers-by to view. It was a complex project and we were insure of the final effect until installation day. It worked and looked amazing.

Concept & Design:

The film was projected from inside onto a leaded clear-glass window using a custom built back-projection screen. The church is grade-one listed, so the screen was made to fit into the interior window recess without any fixtures.

The production process was split into four stages: R&D, filming, editing and installation.

During R&D we visited two stained glass restoration workshops in the city and looked at stained glass graphics and iconography. We were lucky to handle specimens of original glass made locally. We identified recurring figurative characters and motifs which we then reinterpreted in moving image. We wanted to develop the character archetypes from flat, stiff figures into real people, moving within and breaking out of their graphic frame.

In the second stage we identified modern equivalents in the local community: a florist, an archer, choristers and local boxers. We filmed them against a white backdrop in a makeshift studio inside the church and edited the sequences together with other visual motifs like swans and the white roses of yorkshire.

Link to video here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_29m7whYoE6f7Yc4KiooigPDh6vTPUu3/view?usp=sharing