Someone, who shall remain anonymous, obsessed with death or at least the symbols that death represents was responsible for a series of commissions we undertook in the 2010’s based on the sculpture ‘For the Love of God‘. In terms of technique these windows represented a new level of detail in the making of stained glass. The background glass was mouth blown in Germany, we then used diamond saws and diamond grinders to make the unusual shapes which were then painted and fired in our gas kiln. The shapes were then put together using copper foil technique, invented by Louis Comfort Tiffany which produces very thin lead lines, in fact the joins are solder, a mix of lead & tin melted onto copper foil wrapping the edges of each piece of glass. With a wider lead border in place the laborious task of applying Swarovski crystals was achieved using a pair of tweezers and UV curing glue, a process which took two weeks to cover both sides of each panel. The crystals first had to be soaked in nitric acid to remove the mirror backing, the smallest crystal measured 0.2mm in diameter, the largest crystals were 6mm, a total of 7000 crystals were needed for each of the 20 adult skull windows – and took ages to make.
