15 x 20-FOOT TALL STAINED-GLASS WINDOW OVER MAIN ENTRANCE OF PHILLIP’S CHURCH

"[Man's] soul is endowed with translucent windows that open to the beyond."    Abraham Joshua Heschel

Every so often, by design or by chance, the cast of light on water, the vaulted silence of a cathedral, a work of art will tilt us into our spiritual selves, lift us into the numinous realm of our religious experience.  Such an event may engage us differently, speak to us in the lexicon of our particular and private spiritual journey, but it has within it some universal element, some truth, that speaks to our common humanity.

Such is the experience standing before Michelle Honig-Szwarc’s Tan Lane window, an exquisite assemblage of light, color and images that bursts forth from, and yet is simultaneously contained by the embrace of the domed structure and stone tracery that hold it. 

“My intention in designing this window,” says Honig-Szwarc, “was to create a piece which, through its elements, its composition, its conversation of substance and light, would have the potential to spark this process.  A window that would contribute to the consecration of the space it inhabited, not by imposing a particular vision of the sacred, but by provoking a fertile field of possibility that would elicit each individual's spiritual journey.”

Honig-Szwarc's design for the 15 x 20 foot tall stained glass Tan Lane window was selected in an international open competition held by Phillips Exeter Academy.  The window was to complement and be an integral part of a larger renovation of the beautiful, gothic revival, stone church designed by Ralph Adams Cram in 1889.  The goal of the renovation, in which Honig-Szwarc participated as one of the principal architects, was to preserve the original beauty and spirit of the church which had been built for an Episcopalian parish, while also transforming it into a multi-denominational spiritual center that would reflect and serve the current diversity of the Exeter community, as well as generations to come. 

As in the larger renovation, the challenge in designing the stained glass window, was to create a work that would incorporate the original currents and traditions of the space, while informing it with new dynamic elements that would bring the past into the present.  Ultimately it was to create a space that would become a sanctuary for all who entered it, regardless of religious affiliation or belief.

Viewed from the outside, the Tan Lane window offers up the color and shade of stone; browns and tans, the natural lines of the tracery, rooted in and at one with the larger stone structure that holds it.  When you step inside and into the nave, the full spectrum of dazzling colors contained by the tracery is revealed.

At first glance, the window appears to be in constant motion.  A rich, explosion of movement and color that seems to suggest the initial crescendo of creation: the infinite contracting into the finite – here form, here essence; here bone, here spirit; here sinew, here suggestion of the sacred. 

In the universe that emerges with its layers of time and history, elements engage and transform one another in a chemistry that results in constant change and transfiguration.  But throughout all of it – illuminating it, moving through or receding from it in a spectrum of gradations – the original Light.  "What I imagined,"

says Honig-Szwarc, " was light emerging from the very back reaches of time, flowing through all that has come before us, illuminating the present, transforming it, and being transformed by it, and continuing to sweep into eternity."  

Honig-Szwarc’s design works on several planes simultaneously.  It does not impose a narrative or singular experience, so much as present the elements and possibilities, forming and reforming.  We find historical interaction between matter and spirit, divinity and space/time.  We find the profound beauty of the natural world when in certain sections of the window color reaches and hangs like stalagmites and stalactites – their beauty fragile and ephemeral.  But present too is the granularity of our individual physical existence with its grids, its gravity and weight, and also its simultaneous truth that we are constantly in proximity to and able to invite in the ubiquitous illumination.

What Honig-Szwarc’s piece also conveys so exquisitely, with its myriad conjunctions and disjunctions, its marriage of color and light, its suggestion too of music – the clear resonance of individual notes – the collective full-bodied orchestration – and also the jazz-like possibility of notes trailing off in unexpected directions – is that this rich spectrum of spiritual experience is in fact a universal phenomenon.  A phenomenon that does not depend on culture, language, or creed, but that is open to and experienced equally by humankind.

It is not – nor does Honig-Szwarc intend to portray it as – a perfect world.  Discordance, pain and suffering are represented, an intrinsic part of physical reality.  So too is the fact that while the finite and the infinite may be inextricably bound, they are subject to the complexities of time, of action, of history.  But the overall message is that these difficulties are sustainable in a world filled with spirituality.

Honig-Szwarc has used an unusual palette of color and elements to convey the numerous ideas and spiritual phenomena of this piece.  We find illumination in the tincture created by light and color, in the arc of a color lifting away from itself.  We find tradition, layers and planes of history and time, in the use of grids and traditional elements, and then colors bleed and change into other colors and everywhere we look there is constant transformation – both through the admixture of light and glass, and through the intermingling of various colors and compositional elements.

If you turn and view the opalescent, iconographic window on the opposing wall, you will find many of the features common to stained glass windows since the medieval times.  But you might also notice a conversation between the two windows.  The deep greens and blues of the traditional window make their way into the Tan Lane window, and in fact are part of the overriding sense of calm and wholeness that work conveys.  The deep reds appear too in the Tan Lane window but undergo many changes.  The use of traditional forms and tracery is also carried over.  Lead lines flow through various sections of the window like veins, holding the image in our reality and sustaining it.  But then suddenly a line of tracery will give itself up mid-breath and merge into a line of sheer color.  Boundaries and lines dissolve, and color meets color in an ecstatic dance. 

Honig-Szwarc has used the traditional in order to create the universal.  She has established, through her use of traditional colors and forms in segments of the work, that the present and the future cannot be understood, and may in fact be indecipherable without the layers of history and tradition from which they arose.  And yet, she has simultaneously suggested that from these very layers, new forms emerge, new ways of being.  New understandings that include perhaps the essence of the message conveyed by the Tan Lane window:  That though people may differ in their beliefs, they still complement and nurture each other.  And that it is only through mutual respect and tolerance that one can truly honor the sacred.

Michelle Honig-Szwarc worked closely with the Phillips Exeter Academy Church Committee, whose invaluable input informed the various stages of the project, from early design until completion of a full-scale painting of the window.

Following that stage, Honig-Szwarc collaborated with Lyn Hovey studio, one of the country’s leading stained glass studios, to produce the Tan Lane window.  Lyn Hovey Studio, which was responsible for all of the stained and leaded glass restoration in the church, brought its tremendous expertise to the fabrication of this window. 

Some of the challenges of executing the design involved rendering the transfiguration and intermingling of color without inserting additional lead lines that would detract from the sense of emanating light and flow.  This was expertly resolved through a combination of plating, etching, gluing and other techniques, resulting in a truthful rendering of Honig-Szwarc’s original design.