Stained

As an architecture undergraduate in Dublin studing for my first degree; for a time I lived in a small bedsit. The cosy shared house I had started off with came to an abrupt end when the house was put on the market and sold immediately. I can usually unearth the beauty in a place, however evasive it seems; except that bedsit, I despised it. There was a strange plant growing from the bung hole of the shared bath half-way down the stairs and a coin metre that whirred whenever the light was switched on.  The carpets were matted and the daylight that streamed from the attic windows seemed yellowed with nicotine.  The assortment of other occupiers in the building were not seen, other than fleeting shadows beneath doors when I’d arrive home late from my night job. The landlord appeared like clockwork on Friday night and exchanged my money for the old coinage necessary for the meter to work.

I decided that I should try and find something beautiful in the local area.  Beyond the corner shop where the inflated prices were clearly to cover the cost of having a security man follow shoppers around, there was a large church.  Having undertaken some research on the church at my college library, I discovered that there were some beautiful stained-glass windows somewhere in this church.  I decided to attend a church service the following Sunday as that would give me a lengthy opportunity to scope out the beautiful windows.  As I was entering the church on Sunday morning, I found myself walking next to an African woman with a rather amazing headscarf wrapped into her hair.  I felt that as I was underdressed and as I had bathed with a plant growing from the bunghole, perhaps I should visit the church when it was vacant and less threatening.  This didn’t happen, but I did enter the church when a funeral was taking place in the side chapel some time later.  I had a suspicion that the beautiful windows were within that side chapel, so I pushed my head through the gothic oak screen to see the glass and take a photograph. Suddenly the small funeral congregation stood up, triggering me to rise also and get trapped in the oak screen. The more I struggled, the more trapped I became.  I remember the small congregation passing me by, as I tried to free myself from my prison, embarrassed.

Recently, I was in Dublin for important business and I was near that same church and noticing how vacated the city was due to Covid-19, decided that it may finally be a good time to see the beautiful windows.  Placing my sanitised hands on the glass was a moving experience, sensing the textured hand-blown glass properly for the first time. The flecks of colour and the intensity of light through the deep hues was like a shattered bottle of wine.  I realised after a time, that my facemask was catching the tears rolling from my eyes. Eighteen years ago, I was imprisoned in the oak screen behind me, and now I was alone; seeing the artistry of Harry Clarke and feeling it on my fingertips.  His hands had worked this glass. It is timeless; experiencing the Arts and Crafts Movement as freshly as he did before these windows. I have seen better examples of his work in various museums in London and Dublin, but it is the vernacular of these windows that appeals to me as they utilise recycled glass due to monetary constraints of the church.  Harry Clarke’s artistry was able to work within these parameters to illicit an emotional response from me, a passer-by, all these decades later. These windows are nothing without light. So may the sun not go down on them.  These windows remind me of the small church my grandmother used to attend in Monaghan and of leisure days in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London when working for Sir Norman Foster. To see daylight metamorphosised into intense colours was worth wating all these years for. 

Photographs taken by Ben Mc Cabe

The Art of the Broken

Simple farmstead vernacular is immensely appealing, lacking the ubiquity of chichi city buildings. Unpretentious, under-articulated and humbly risen from the place it sits, the cottage is the crucible of our culture.  Simple materials and design in a vernacular minimalism; pure functionality through localised evolution. The cottage was the little white-washed power-house of a western smallholding, producing food for itself and the nation.

The farmstead has fallen out of liveable use and nature reclaims what was borrowed from it; the lissom lime render caking off, caving corrugated roofs and chimneys collapsing onto a mound of nettles.  If we stand for a moment on the brink of forgotten, and look around at our island vernacular, we can appreciate the art of the broken.  The Japanese call it kintsugi; reparation of the broken pieces – the beauty of the mends in something that was surely to be discarded.  The fissures are expressed; the damage is accentuated, creating something profound.  There is enormous opportunity to explore this artistic ideology in architecture, in vestiges of our broken vernacular.  However, the result should become something more beautiful than the original pieces, otherwise leave well alone.