The Literature Windows

The 'Literature Windows' present Brian Clarke’s reimagining of the Perpendicular Gothic window. Taking a window with five lancets as his template, he irregularly fills the apertures with collaged pages from works of literature.

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The 'Literature Windows' present Brian Clarke’s reimagining of the Perpendicular Gothic window. Taking a window with five lancets as his template, he irregularly fills the apertures with collaged pages from works of literature.

In The Journal of Stained Glass, Vol. XXIV, Carol Jacobi writes in 2011:

‘The "Literature Windows" possess the musical qualities of their gothic architectural antecedents, the five perpendicular lights creating rhythm within rhythm. The twenty iterations, however, pitch measure and interval against a more runaway tempo, re-multiplied in the columns of découpage text. These are themselves open-ended; famous first pages from Death in Venice, The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, leave us mid-sentence. The slim mullions and foliate mouldings also, at times, turn from stone to writing as their ink outlines falter, doodle, fly off. Medieval canon becomes modern jazz.’

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