September 20, 2024

LETTER 371

In Australia, an Old-Fashioned Art Is Having a Revival

By Julia Bergin

People sit at tables in a room decorated with stained glass windows decorated with koala bears and other Australian themes.

Australian-themed stained glass windows in Queensland, Australia, in 2018. Dean Swindell for The New York Times

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week's issue is written by Julia Bergin.

Jonathan Rowatt, a Melbourne hospitality director, said he was tired of cafes featuring "clean lines," bars fitted out in "varying shades of white" and restaurants with a "beige aesthetic."

So in 2021, while overseeing the refurbishment of a 12-lane bowling alley and leisure center, he decided to commission 35 yards of stained glass.

The huge piece of blue, red, yellow and white stained glass cost about $34,000 and took more than a year to create and install. Now complete, the work by Jodie-Mae Holm, a Melbourne artist, wraps all the way around the top of the building's bar, bistro and front desk.

Ms. Holm, 27, has worked with stained glass for only three years, but she's one of a dozen young artists who industry veterans say are responsible for helping revive the art form in Australia.

"In 2015 we only had four young people under the age of 40 in the whole of Australia who had been trained to properly conserve stained glass," said Donna Kennedy. She is the director of GLAAS, a nonprofit organization devoted to stained glass.

Lead lighting, as it's also known, is the artistic practice of pairing cut glass with malleable rods of lead to depict figurative or abstract forms. In the early 1900s, it was common in Australian homes to have stained glass in the front door and complementary window fittings throughout the rest of the house.

But stained glass fell out of fashion after World War II. Revived by hobbyists in the 1970s and '80s, it declined again as tastes moved to modern and minimal.

Ms. Kennedy said the trade was nearly dead as older practitioners retired and studios that thrived in the '80s closed. Soon after the turn of the century, she said there were no more than five stained glass studios in Melbourne, down from 50 in the late '80s.

One demographic, however, that artists say never lost interest in the art form were gay men. Rodney Marshall, 83, a longtime stained-glass artist and painter, said they were a consistent customer base. Ms. Holm also had the same observation.

It took five years of lobbying, but in 2020, Ms. Kennedy was able to offer the country's first TAFE glass and glazing course at Melbourne Polytechnic. (TAFE, the acronym for "technical and further education," refers to a degree-granting program that is trade-focused.)

Her original class of 12 students, of whom Ms. Holm was one, have since made waves in national and international art and architectural circles. Next year, she's offering 80 places.

"I would definitely call it a renaissance," Ms. Kennedy said, reeling off a list of student achievements in the past four years: national art awards, international fellowships, appearances in British Vogue, collaborations with some of the country's most prominent architects and artists, residential installations for "wealthy collectors," and a variety of sports clubs, pubs and restaurants.

Over the last five years, stained glass has moved from somber 10- foot renditions of the Virgin Mary in a grand church to modern light wells, mirrors, floor-to-ceiling screens, and bus shelters. Despite evolving applications, adaptations and interpretations, the process remains unchanged.

"You can go into a museum or any of the cathedrals in Europe and everything they did then is exactly what we're doing now," Ms. Holm said.

The tools are the same, the manual labor is the same, and so too are the health risks of lead poisoning. Practitioners are required to have blood tests twice a year.

Mr. Marshall, the 83-year-old, tartly confirmed he's "not dead yet." Over the years, he has worked on some of Australia's biggest stained glass projects, including the two-year restoration of Sydney's Queen Victoria building, and more niche commissions like a front door and side window for a fleeting "half a second" shot of the homestead in the 2008 film "Australia."

Mr. Marshall is still working with stained glass. He's amassed a huge collection of work — in schools, hospitals, churches, brothels and homes — that his wife, Osa Marshall, hopes will get recognition with the renewed resurgence of stained glass. In the past, she said, stained glass practitioners saw themselves as artisans or builders, not artists — a view shared by society more generally

One of Ms. Kennedy's main aims with the Melbourne Polytechnic course was to change that perception, to take the industry from "trade" to "art." Mission accomplished, she said, with the young cohort of design-savvy and social media literate artists leveraging traditional techniques for contemporary use.

"People weren't used to seeing the creative ways you could approach glass," said Eloise McCullough, a graduate of the program and a stained glass artist. "Now it's treated more like an artwork than just a window."

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