Capter La Laumiere
Foreword

They are some twenty female glass artists and over twenty years they have shared, competed, researched and created!

Today they live and work in Europe, North America, Australia, and from Japan to New Zealand too.

But it was in Chartres that they formed a close knit association, immediately
after the founding of the group in Bremen, even then under the auspices of the
International Centre for Stained-Glass Art, which helped the founding members,
the management gambling on their talents and determination,
And twenty years on they have come back to us, 1988/2008, to show us the works that this long genesis has produced, and all infused with vigour, innovation and power of expression! But visitors to Gathering Light, their exhibition, will be asking, «Who are these women?» The answers are many and varied and lie in the personal journey that each of them has travelled to get here.
Many of them are graduates from schools of architecture or major prestigious schools of plastic arts in France, Germany, Britain and the United States; others have worked as lithographers or mosaic artists. But they all share one characteristic: the excellence of their masters, themselves involved in the renaissance of monumental stained-glass art and research into light.

This has created a veritable melting pot, in spite of the distances separating the different members of the group. They have experimented with both collective and individual processes, but always as part of a group approach; they have made use of new glass technology, but without making a single concession to cheap or simply decorative effects. Within this group of female glass artists, the ancient art of stained glass has transformed into a new creative language, demanding and groundbreaking.
Today, these artists are forging a new language of stained glass and its indispensable complement, daylight. In this era of the interaction of global sensibilities, they have succeeded in exchanging their cultural heritage, from Japan to Iceland, from France to the United States, setting out, through their daily work and their different collaborations, a very new vocabulary put to the service of art. In their meetings, organised in a different capital city every two years, there has been no trace of feminist demands for equality in the practice of this knowledge and their art.

But among them a rarely seen vigour has grown up, born from the remarkable desire of the founding members to open up new ways forward, breaking out of the dogmatism and imperatives of the technique and the conformist attitudes of those commissioning works. Observing these different sources of creative momentum is part of the International Centre for Stained-Glass Art's very mission, but its mission goes further and includes providing support and assistance for any remarkable, unifying approach to stained-glass art.
This is a presentation to the world, to the public, so demanding and desperate for something new, but also to the researchers, students and artists who have been coming to the International Centre for Stained-Glass Art for more than thirty years; but we must also express our recognition, perhaps even our consecration of these artists. Are they not just as valuable to us as the artists and stained-glass painters of the Middle Ages in the western world?

Even then, to build their cathedrals, the master builders brought together «hands»from the furthest reaches of civilisation, hands who had the ability to express and raise a thought, a spiritual tradition, to its highest level of expression.

In this way, the language of the sacred was built up through knowledge, as much manual as intellectual, which today continues to serve as an inestimable cultural reference point. Spreading the word about the creative energy that emanates from the Gathering Light exhibition, and more permanently from this book, seems to us to be a necessity in order:

• to demonstrate the tremendous effect of such community projects, the fruit of global exchanges that are entirely compatible with the new world order of cultural exchange,

• to transform, since this is still sometimes necessary, our onerous heritage of the inferiority of women, in the vast field of architectural stained glass; We de not want more sculptors like Camille Claudel, we want more stained-glass artists in the mould of Christine de Pisan!

• to pass on to the rising generations a call for art, whether for places of work, dwellings or tomorrow's sanctuaries, shunning conformism, repetition and ordinariness.

I would like to express a wish, destined for the ears of the main cultural and economic decision-makers: that from now on they pay attention in the long-term to the energy and talent of these female artists, and more generally to the thriving world of master stained-glass window makers, researchers and teachers of the art of stained glass and light.

- Servane de Layre-Mathéus
President of the International Centre for Stained-Glass Art