New stained glass window in memory of war poet

A NEW stained-glass window commemorating the poet Wilfred Owen has been installed at All Saints’ Church in Dunsden.

Artist Natasha Redina was commissioned last year after winning the annual Stevens Architectural Glass Competition, run by the Worshipful Company of Glaziers and Painters of Glass.

The cost of the window, which came to £17,500, was raised by the Dunsden Owen Association, which celebrates the life and work of the First World War poet.

Owen lived at the vicarage in Dunsden as a teenager from 1911 to 1913, when he worked as a lay assistant to the Rev Herbert Wigan. His mother, father and sister are buried in the churchyard.

The new window replaces an existing single lancet window in the nave of the church.

The lower panels, in browns and yellows, depict Owen holding a pen and paper, sitting in front of a tree.

A quote from a poem he wrote while living in the parish, in response to the death of a mother and her four-year-old daughter in a horse and cart accident, curves upwards over him: “Deep under turfy grass and heavy clay,/They laid her bruised body, and the child,/Poor victims”.

On the middle panels, there is a map of the Wilfred Owen trail in the village on a background of light blues and greens. The blues deepen and stars appear at the top of the window, which has lines from Revelation 21:4: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death.”

In the depiction of the night sky is a “Goethe colour wheel”, named after the German poet who used it to illustrate his ideas about how colours impact mood and emotion.

Ms Redina, who is 50 and lives in London, said: “The basic design, the way the lettering moves around, was actually based on geometry.

“I studied at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts and they taught geometry to do with sacred buildings. I just started playing with the compass and I figured out these lines as they ran through the window — it kind of follows the contours of the building.

“It’s like the three layers of awareness. The first bottom panel is to do with the earth and that perspective of suffering. And when we’re faced with injustice and suffering, how do we cope with that? Because it doesn’t make any sense and it’s just so overwhelming. He’s looking at us in a very kind of questioning way like one of these first strong experiences of death and injustice. And that’s a theme that went through all this work.

“Then you move up to the second layer and there you see more of a mythological level of pilgrimage of trying to overcome that and find a way to overcome that pain.

“And so you see the Wilfred Owen trail that goes all around this church, like a little pilgrim route.

“Then the upper panel because the eye kind of travels up and it’s about transcending or finding some kind of meaning, almost looking beyond the ego.

“You look at the stars and the infinite universe and it all kind of starts to make sense then and for people of faith it’s Revelation as well where it says — and I think a lot of people take a lot of solace from that scripture when they lose somebody — that there would be no more death.

“The Goethe wheel is the multi-coloured wheel to represent the inclusivity of all the different faiths and peoples and orientations.”

Ms Redina said the nature of the hand-blown glass meant that the colours of the window will change throughout the day, revealing hidden elements to the design, and even Owen’s expression will change.

“I left it quite transparent because then the eye moves through and you can see the trees in the background,” she said.

“And there are things that I’ve put in there, little subtle things that change throughout the day, so they come in and out, like some of the children. There’s a little wagon. There’s a mother and child in there somewhere. It all depends on the time of day and the light and it’s almost like a moving image.”

Her aim was to use traditional techniques in a modern design. The panels were made with two layers of mouth-blown glass, called Lamberts Blue Flash and Lamberts Red Flash, on top of each other.

She went to Bavaria to source it. Ms Redina said: “They have the furnaces going 24 hours a day. It’s a bit like entry into Middle Earth, with these burly men blowing over the glass.”

She did not have enough space in her own studio to work on the panels, so she rented a space in Derix Glass Studios outside Frankfurt where she spent three weeks in June working on the window.

She said: “Downstairs they have a little self-contained studio, so I had somewhere to sleep and eat in a little kitchen. Everyone would leave at 5pm and I’d be on my own in this huge factory. The first few days I was a bit scared but by the end I had got used to it and it meant I had 24-hour access, which was incredible.

“Often my most productive times were after everyone had left. I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard. I would start about 7 in the morning and often not finish until 11pm. They cooked me a hot meal every day. I didn’t eat otherwise. It was three weeks of intense work.”

To create the different colours in the glass, Ms Redina used a process of experimentation, applying resists to the glass which were then dipped in acid baths to take away layers of colour, or adding silver stain and putting the panels in a kiln.

She explained: “I acid-etched both layers, so when you get the red and the blue you apply silver stain, which is yellow. So with those three things you can create all the colours from that all layered on top of each other. I didn’t use any paints at all. It was quite a challenge I set for myself because I could have just painted it.”

Ms Redina, who was an ethnographer and a psychotherapist before she began working with stained glass, visited Dunsden for inspiration.

She walked the Owen trail and saw the local flowers and wildlife which are depicted in the window.

She also visited other places of significance during Owen’s life, including Craiglockhart Hospital, near Edinburgh, where he was admitted for shell shock after fighting in the Battle of the Somme.

It was there that he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon and wrote two of his most famous poems, Anthem for Doomed Youth and Dulce et decorum est.

Ms Redina also travelled to the Forester’s House, near Ors in France, where Owen spent his final night before being killed at the age of 25.

She said: “I travelled with my elderly mother. We drove over and planned to arrive at 5am at the place where he was killed. It was still dark and we were driving in this forest and it started to rain.

“As soon as we got out, we heard gunshots. And I said to mother, ‘Did you hear that?’ And she could hear it. It was very spooky. The next day we were talking to the locals and they said, ‘Oh yeah, the gunshots. It’s either ghosts or hunters.’

“To think about his last day, his last night, how terrifying that must have been. And it was a week before Armistice, which is so tragic. Making this panel, I really felt his presence.”

The panels were installed last week by Dan Humphries and India Savill, of Dan Humphries Stained Glass. They had previously leaded the seven panels created by Ms Redina into three units, which were framed in bronze, at their workshop in Glastonbury.

Mr Humphries said the original window, which was made of quarry glass tiles, had come out “fairly easily”. The pair then installed a transparent layer of glass to protect the panels from the elements.

He said: “We fitted some toughened, German drawn glass that sort of mimics hand-blown glass so you’ve got a really tough external protective glazing layer and that fits in the original glazing plane.

“Effectively, the panels are isolated from the weather and the normal function of a window. They don’t have the rain on them. It’s perhaps like hanging an artwork rather than like awindow but it should last indefinitely.”

Ms Redina hopes the window will offer comfort to those who need it.

“I’m happy it’s done and I just really hope that it will be liked,” she said. “I hope it will be a solace for people who are grieving and in pain. Because in a sense that’s what stained glass is, it’s the light coming through and the colours kind of imbuing the parishioners. I think it’s so connected to emotions. Hopefully it will be something that people can find solace in.”

Linda Glithro, of the Dunsden Owen Association, said: “We are so thrilled with the window, it is stunning. This is a project in which the local community and the church have been able to work together.”

The window will be officially dedicated at a ceremony on November 4, the anniversary of Owen’s death. The event is by invitation only.