On Pellucid Glassworks

Anne-Marie of Pellucid Glassworks sits down with Unlaced’s Lagoon Myers.

Stained glass captivated me more than the sermons of my youth. I found myself drowning out droning by washing myself in the delicate glass, more jewel-tone than the everyday glass of windshields and kitchen windows. So often, stained glass can feel like a stifling religious relic. Canterbury Cathedral, for example, has 1200m of stained glass, including Christ’s genealogy, historical sieges, and the ancestors of Christ, which are the oldest stained glass works in England, dating back to the 1130s. These intricate windows bathe the chapels in blues–which symbolize heavenly light. According to Scottish Stained Glass’ website, each colour has its own symbolism, with cool colours being the colours of rebirth, love, and hope. Stained glass allowed illiterate worshippers to follow along with biblical tales. The artistic value of Canterbury Cathedral’s stained glass can never be debated, but how does stained glass fit into contemporary life?

Pellucid Glass is self-taught, and subverts traditional stained glass norms by creating erotic art. Anne-Marie refers to herself as a ‘chronic crafter’. Our interest in stained glass originates similarly, gazing up at a sanctuary during sermon, “in awe that it was all glass”. After moving a thousand miles from her home of Houston, Texas to Fort Wayne, Indiana during 2020, Anne-Marie saw an Instagram post of a family member’s stained glass project and thought, “I could do that”. She only read three pages of the instruction manual before diving in, citing YouTube and Reddit for any particular questions. Pellucid Glass evokes childhood nostalgia with designs often including cartoon and children’s book characters, and toys like Tamagotchi. Even Anne-Marie’s nude subjects can be traced back to nostalgia as her late grandmother drew nudes. She shared, “I would lose hours looking through her old sketchbooks as a kid, so I grew up really admiring the human body”.

Anne-Marie says she fell into erotic stained glass art out of boredom with traditional styles and art-deco suncatchers. She then noticed the obvious whitewashing of stained glass subjects, including in her own work. There is very little diversity in stained glass representation in both race and sexuality; that is something Anne-Marie hopes to change with her work.

When it came to “The Lovers,” I wanted to portray a couple of colour. I had a few sheets of these gorgeous, incredibly saturated shades of brown and it just snapped together in my head. I wanted vibrancy and I wanted it to be full of passionate colours so the browns, reds, and pinks were a natural combination to me. It’s easily one of my favourite pieces I’ve ever done.

“The Lovers” is also one of my favourite pieces of Anne-Marie’s work. It features rich warm yellow, brown, and red, of lovers in embrace on a pale pink bedspread, against an amber sky. It contrasts so much to the white-washed stained glass I remembered from cathedrals–it makes heavenly our sexuality, which is simply humanity and not sin. I imagine at golden hour it will bathe a west-facing room in a warm light, ripe for after-dinner intimacy. I’d like to imagine a life where we all are invested in our sunlight, because we want to dance with colours across the floor!