Colorful Windows in Church | Sarah Hall Studio

Sacred Space

Radiance, Reflection, Revelation

Location: First Unitarian Congregation, Toronto, ON
Description: Tower Window and 3 Library Windows

The tower rises through the building like a crystal prism in its natural stone matrix with the glasswork adding a mystical, totemic presence. The stained glass design was inspired by the Unitarian’s flaming chalice symbol which represents Revelation. This sinuous, golden spiral of flames passes through a soft, white, veil moving upwards without end.

View Image

Road to Damascus

Location: St. Paul the Apostle Church, Burlington, ON
Description: Narthex Entryway & Chapel of Reservation Doors

“Stained glass has an immediate appeal to us, by reason of its emotive power, so much akin to ours, and its impassioned crystallization.”
ANDRE MALRAUX

View Image

Canterbury Windows

Location: Thomas a Becket Catholic Church, Canton, MI
Description: Sanctuary & Tower Windows

“Colour is the language of the poets. It is astonishingly lovely. To speak it is a privilege.”
KEITH CROWN

View Image

Rosary & Coronation Windows

Location: Immaculate Conception Church, Toronto, ON
Description: 25 Choir Clerestory Windows

“Sarah uses colour and line in architectonic harmony much as choreographers blend movement, music, and the bodies of individual dancers into unified, complementary compositions. In Sarah’s work, the blend includes the subtle interrelationships between glass as window, glass as design, and glass functioning in concert with architecture.”
K. COREY KEEBLE

View Image

New Dawn & Fields of Praise

Location: Grace Church on-the-Hill, Toronto, ON
Description: 2 Narthex Windows

My image of the ‘the Kingdom’ encompasses both heaven and earth. The heavens spiral downwards. The sun warms the land and wheat grows joyfully and abundantly. Streams and water flow through the base of the windows.

View Image

Light of the World Windows

Location: Immaculate Conception Church, Woodbridge, ON
Description: One of 38 Sanctuary and Chapel Windows

“Her most uncompromisingly modern designs nevertheless show scrupulous regard for the essential reality of her medium as two-dimensional design in transparent colour and opaque line.”
K. COREY KEEBLE

View Image

Niggun – A Song without Words

Location: B’nai Keshet Synagogue, Montclair, NJ
Description: Entryway, Clerestory and Sanctuary Windows

“B’nai Keshet is never the same. Coloured light streams in, patterns form on the walls, glass takes on a sudden glow —and in a moment, all of the colour, patterns and glow have disappeared or changed with the movement of the sun or a cloud. The windows possess a beauty that helps us to appreciate the beauty that surrounds us. There is a strength to their geometric structure which invites our own quiet. And there is a playfulness to the windows which makes us want to sing in response.”
RABBI DAN EHRENKRANTZ

View Image

Everlasting Light

Location: St Catharine of Siena Church, Columbus, OH
Description: 54 Windows – Sanctuary, Nave, Transepts, Sacristy, Baptistery, Shrine, Porch and Narthex

“Stained glass captures sunlight and heightens our experience of it. Like clay that goes through the fire, light that passes through stained glass is transformed. Light itself becomes a tangible presence, as concrete as the walls and furniture. It also transforms the space within, giving it subtlety and poetic luminosity. If sunlight is what gives a building its soul, then it is stained glass that reveals the soul of sunlight.”
PETER COFFMAN

View Image

Creation Window

Location: Rose of Lima Catholic Church, Toronto, ON
Description: One of 42 windows for the Sanctuary, Narthex, Chapel, Reconciliation Room & Entryways

“To the religious person, everything is religious. God can be sensed, discerned and somehow found, in all created things. God’s first words in creation were: ‘Let there be Light.’ But light, the revealing creature, can also be contemplated in itself.”
PETER LARISEY, SJ

View Image

The Living Cross

Location: Thornhill United Church, Thornhill, ON
Description: Sanctuary Rosette Window

“Sarah Hall re-conceptualizes devotional spaces and images in new ways. In her magnificent ‘Living Cross’ Rosette Window, she has the vegetative colours of life in the form of a cross, suggesting the Resurrection and Pentecost as much as the Crucifixion itself. She re-imagines Christ as nature, a tree, a plant, as ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’(Dylan Thomas). The crucifixion is living, and recurrent. It goes on at all times, in all places.”
J S PORTER

View Image

A Tree of Life

Location: Redeemer Episcopal Church, Cincinnati, OH
Description: Narthex, Chancel Windows

“The religious imagination survives for most people today as not just the primary but virtually the only credible instance of an imagination working in a total way.”
SUSAN SONTAG

View Image

Glory Window

Location: Cathedral of the Holy Family, Saskatoon, SK
Description: One of 5 monumental sanctuary windows

“It may be helpful to think of the Glory window as a parable told in stained glass. It uses not words but image, line and texture, tint and hue, angles of light and streams of colour as its forms in trying to evoke the biblical promise of life in God’s presence, Lux Gloria. When the early morning sun, unimpeded by clouds, beams through this large east-facing window, it floods the cathedral with glorious light.”
ARCHBISHOP DONALD BOLEN

View Image