PAGANUS: Stories in stained glass

I wanted to make the stained glass windows from see-through packaging. The designs are taken from various real life windows that I have photographed in churches I've visited or that I've found photos of online. I then scale down the photograph on a computer to the appropriate size for the window aperture, and then trace the design onto the packaging with Sharpies. I wondered about just colour printing the image but doing it by hand was more fun, and also allowed me to change the colour scheme from the original, and to draw the background designs freehand.

I'm still not sure about the result: the colours of the Sharpies are limited, even considering that I sometimes mix the colours, either like paint on the packaging surface, or by colouring each side with a different colour. I am also not sure whether the pinks and purples are too modern for a Victorian chapel. But I don't really want to remake every window as it is quite a time-consuming process. Any thoughts? Many of the photos below were taken before I had finished all the stained glass, but I've included them to show the process.

I wanted the design to be Christian on the surface, but hiding a secret code. The left hand window represents the Heavens, with angels on a starry sky background - Archangels Raphael, Michael and Gabriel in the main three windows. 

The right hand window with its green leafy background represents the Earthly domain, specifically England, with King Arthur, St George and Joseph of Arimathea in the main three windows, suggesting a secret Grail code. 

The central window has an androgynous St John in the centre, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," thought by some to represent Mary Magdalene in Da Vinci's famous Last Supper. To his/her left is St Christopher who "bears" Christ, and to the right is St Margaret, patron saint of childbirth. Above them will be Gabriel coming from heaven (on the left) to tell Mary she will bear the Christ-child, next to the risen Christ appearing in the garden (on the right) to Mary Magdalene, below the Holy Grail in the topmost window. Any ideas what secret code this window is trying to suggest? It's very derivative from the Da Vinci Code I know...

Each of the three windows has a dragon, slain or tamed by St Michael, St Margaret and St George. The upper scenes in the Earth window also show serpents: the snake tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden, and Moses rebuking the Israelites for worshipping the Bronze Serpent (with a child being compared to it as Christ is the alternative). 

If the secret message of the central window is that Mary Magdalene bore Christ's child (like the serpent arising from the chalice of St John in the centre), then the Earth window suggests that her serpent child came to Britain, and headed a lineage of dragons, the Pendragons, whose most famous King was Arthur. Joseph of Arimathea on the far right looks suspiciously like Merlin, and, with Glastonbury Tor in the background, he guards the San Greal itself. 

PAGANUS: The Ancestral Tomb

The tomb on the South wall of the chapel is for Paganus Trenchard, the earliest recorded Trenchard in England. He collected the Danegeld for Henry I in the Isle of Wight and lived at Hord Hill, or Hordle or Hord Hall: old medieval spellings differ radically thus muddle the place's original association - was it a hall or a hill or both? I have named my castle after this place, so that it is an imaginary family seat, a Hord of all the treasures the family might have passed down to each other through the ages if they hadn't moved to Dorset, Somerset and beyond. 

I have also named the chapel after its deceased occupier, so it is PAGANUS or the Pagan Chapel, with symbolic references in it to Celtic, Roman, Jedi, Jewish, Daoist, Vedic, Christian and pre-Roman Earth religions, and to nature. 

Inspiration for the tomb's design comes from Archbishop ?'s tomb in Norwich Cathedral (below). 

But the effigy itself was a lucky find in Canterbury Cathedral gift shop. It's actually a statue of the Black Prince's tomb (below). I know it has a crown on it which is unbefitting Paganus, but it looks better than the statue of Henry VIII's armour that I was going to use instead.

Below is the tomb in construction with the originally intended effigy occupant: a statuette of Henry VIII's armour from the Tower of London.

The green and red card is from exercise book covers, decorated with gold and black pens to resemble the original model at Norwich, and the stonework is made of layers of cereal packet card, between two and eight layers thick. The fleurs de lys at the top are a brass etching and the bosses beneath include a green man, a dragon, an angel and a squirrel, all cut out of cereal packet card. The backing is wrapping paper, and the side pillars are hexagonal pencils layered up with card strips.

The inside ceiling of the tomb (all cereal packet card again) is probably the most complicated part, and will be hardly visible when finished so here is a photo of it as the effigy would see it.

I want the effigy of the tomb to tip up revealing a secret passageway. This means I have to wait until I've worked out where this leads before I can complete the tomb and the wall behind. This shows the working inside: 

PAGANUS: The Pagan Chapel

I've been making the chapel over about three years (whilst touring so not at home much). I've tried to make as much as possible out of recycled materials: the walls are made from cardboard boxes, the stonework from cereal packet card, and the pillars from pencils, painted to look like marble. 

The floor is colour printed. Some medieval tiles from Clarendon Place are displayed in the British Museum on a wall: I thought they deserved a home on a floor so using a photograph from a book, I have duplicated the tile patterns on the computer to fit my chapel floor, and then scored it to make individual tiles. 

The altar step bears the inscription 

"I am (Yahweh in Hebrew and Judaism) the Way (Tao in Chinese philosophy), the Truth (in Greek philosophy) and the Life" (Prana in Sanskrit and the Vedas). This biblical phrase is usually taken to mean that Christ is the only route to heaven, but I've always thought it should mean the opposite: that enlightenment comes from oneness with All That Is (the great creative principle I Am) and that this doctrine can be discovered in many different cultures, philosophies and religions, not just via Christianity. So in my chapel, one would have to climb this epistological step to reach the altar.

PAGANUS: Chapel in construction

The windows are made from folded up strips of cereal packet. Each window took about two days to make. The design is common in Somerset churches. I had to cheat with the arches as I couldn't bend folded card to the correct angle. Instead I used an arched insert over the inner wall to give the illusion that the window arched.

For the chancel roof, layers of coloured card are kept in place using corrugated card templates and wood glue. The blue starry sky design is loosely based on decoration in the side chapels of Notre Dame.

By contrast, the nave ceiling is largely copied from the tudor Choir roof in Peterborough Cathedral where I used to sing as a Lay Clerk. 

It took me ages to work out how to measure the right angles and curves to cut the card to the right dimensions to form the vaulting.

The bosses are my own design of zodiac signs and other constellations, each less than a cm in diameter, cut out from gold card from a Christmas cracker. 

The yellow background card is stained with tea bags to get a similar colour to the original in Peterborough.

The gold-black ribbing that joins the bosses is made from cocktail sticks and willow reed, all laboriously painted.

And below is the original in Peterborough. Mmm, putting the two photographs together makes me realise how different the colours in my model are from the original but it's too late now!

The central roof boss reflects my love of Star Wars: 

I decapitated a Yoda toy, set him in blue tack and surrounded him with modelling clay painted leaves to make him into a green man boss like the ones in Norwich Cathedral cloister.

The arches beneath the windows in the chancel are decorated with tiny leaves cut from card: oak, vine, ivy and holly. Below is how they looked before being stuck in place.

I debated for ages how to make the capitals of the chancel pillars, but eventually decided to use the same leaf technique as the arches, cutting out a strip of cardboard leaves, and then bending it round layers of card stuck to the pencil.

Opposite the tomb are some romanesque arches, copied from Peterborough and Durham Cathedrals, and Bristol library gateway. 

I eventually found a way to make the curved edges at the bottom of each arch, by curling strips of card, and then tea staining individual 'stones' to make it look less like one piece of cereal packet card.

The photographed skeleton monument in one of the arches is a detail from Norwich Cathedral and bears the inscription: 

"All you that do this place pass bye

Remember death for you must dye

As you are now even so was I

And as I am so shall you be.

Thomas Gooding here doth staye

Waiting for God's judgement daye."

The floor is printed out on a computer: I took a photo of some medieval tiles from Clarendon Place, hanging on the wall in the British Museum. I thought they deserved a chapel floor to belong to so I duplicated the design on the computer to fit my chapel, printed out the results and then scored it to feel like individual tiles.

The perfectionist in me now feels that the overall effect of the chapel is perhaps too colourful and busy to be realistic, and I wish I had studied ecclesiastical architecture's sense of proportion more before I started to better replicate the wall thicknesses, arch angles, vault thickness, etc. Still, it's been an imaginative adventure to create.

THE LADY DE MOHUN ROOM: The Screens Passage

The Lady De Mohun (pronounced Moon) room is named after Christiana De Mohun, who married into the Trenchard family in the 1100s, bringing De Mohun money and their home, Wolfeton House in Dorset, which then became the main family home for the next four to five hundred years. In this fictitious castle, I have taken the liberty to completely reimagine this woman as Lady Arabella De Mohun: a creative Victorian lady, a devotee of the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson, who faced a life-changing dilemma: whether to marry for wealth and security, or for love, or to remain chaste. I imagine that she created this room whilst deliberating this fork in her life, and chose and arranged the tapestries, paintings and room decoration as a reflection of her thoughts. I was inspired in this by Isabella Stewart Gardiner's creative curation of art in her Boston House Museum. 

The room is the entrance hall to the castle and is linked to the screens passage, allowing entrance to the Great Hall beyond. The screens passage wallpaper is Morris' Michaelmas Daisy pattern, the closest I could find in colour to look like the Ante Library in Arundel Castle (below) which I love.

The ceiling is folded up paper printed with a design from a photo of the chapel ceiling in Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Elsinore Castle, and it's association with James I and Hamlet, will become a theme throughout the castle.

Around the cornice of the room is written an extract from Tennyson's poem The Lady of Shalott:

From underneath his helmet flowed

His coal-blacks curls as on he rode...

Rode down to Camelot: 

She left the web, she left the loom, 

She saw the helmet and the plume...

Out flew the web and opened wide, 

The mirror cracked from side to side,

"The curse has come upon me" cried

The Lady of Shalott.

The room design is of the Victorian era, when this poem was popular, particularly with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.

The front door of the whole castle leads into this ante room, which is hung with the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries from the Musee de Moyen Age in Paris, made famous in the Griffindor Common Room design in the Harry Potter films.

The lion and unicorn from the tapestries (representing sun and moon) are replicated on either side of the door frame, made out of layered up cereal packet card, with vine and olive leaves below. The door fittings are cut from card packaging, painted black, with a black paper clip and beads forming the door handle. The pillars are pencils. I have yet to design the capitals for them...

The cereal packet card fireplace inside has heraldry cut out from a postcard of Oxford Colleges shields, but the central shield is the Trenchard coat of arms. The surround tiles are all printed out from photographs of those at Dunster Castle, Somerset, but the overall fireplace design is a smaller amalgamation of two genuine tudor fireplaces in Tattershall Castle, Lincs (below) which I have only ever seen photographs of. 

The tapestries represent the five senses, and another sixth sense (possibly love) framed by a blue tent. This sixth tapestry hangs behind the fireplace, the pyramid of the tent door echoing the pyramid of the fireplace design below. The tapestries' lions and unicorns represent the sun and the moon, day and night. 

The paintings in this room develop the themes of sun and moon, Yang and Yin, the acceptable daylight of marriage, and the irrational (to men) feminine chastity of the moon goddess, Diana. Over the fireplace hang Mary I and Elizabeth I, sisters whose different religions and marital statuses set them as far apart as night and day: Mary who, to secure her honour and the Catholicism of her realm, accepted marriage with the powerful Philip II of Spain (who would later bring war to England in the form of the Armada); and Elizabeth the virgin queen whose fierce chastity and independence made her harsh enough even to be capable of ordering the execution of her favourite, Robert Dudley. Mary's portrait holds a rose of love; Elizabeth's a rainbow of peace (no rainbow without the sun, is the inscription, implying that she herself is both the chaste moon, AND the masculine sun). 

Mary's husband Philip of Spain commissioned a series of mythological paintings from Titian, two of which are in this room (the other five will be elsewhere in the castle too). These paintings further explain Lady De Mohun's exploration of spinsterhood and marriage.

Over the tapestry of sight hangs Titian's Diana and Actaeon (from the National Gallery), which shows the goddess of the moon and chastity, with a bow like Elizabeth's, killing Actaeon for seeing her bathe naked whilst out hunting. Chastity is fiercely independent and can gain dominance over men.

Over the tapestry of touch hangs Titian's Venus and Adonis (from the Prado), where Venus clings to Adonis (who looks suspiciously like Philip), as he goes off to the hunt that will cause his death. Mary correlates perhaps to Venus, and Elizabeth to Diana. In both these stories, the men's hunting results in their death.

Over the tapestry of taste, behind the door, hangs Mary Queen of Scots, cousin to Mary and Elizabeth. She married three times, allegedly killing her second husband by poisoning (like Gertrude in Hamlet). Around her portrait hang Salome, with the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and Judith with the head of her attempted rapist Holofernes. Robert Dudley, Elizabeth's favourite, whom she intended for Mary Stuart but later had executed after he married one of her ladies, also hangs here. The power of women's love to poison and destroy their partners is evident on this wall. 

Turning towards the Great Hall, the visitor will see Rubens' Judgement of Paris (also from the National Gallery) hanging between the two screen's passage doorways. Here Paris chooses between three archetypal women: the power and wealth of Juno, the wisdom of Minerva, and the beauty and love of Venus. He of course chooses Venus, launching a thousand ships to Troy, like the Armada to England. The right doorway has shells above it like the oyster of Venus' birth. The left doorway has butterflies above it, including the 'peacock' of the 'monarch' Juno. 

If these doors represent choosing these respective goddesses, then the third door to the far left must represent the wise choice of Minerva. To seek wealth and power or love will take us into the Great Hall, the place of family and heritage. But to choose wisdom will lead us to a different part of the castle...