Artist Maud Cotter sees stained glass as an exciting way to express her ideas.
It was at the Crawford Municipal Art School in Cork that Maud Cotter's fascination with stained glass began.
She was intrigued by the potential of what to many people might seem a dying craft.
In combining traditional techniques with new materials, Maud sees exciting new opportunities to expand and develop this art form.
Maria Keating dropped by Maud's Cork studio to find out more about the process of working with stained glass. Inspiration for Maud's work often comes from the landscape. These ideas go down on paper in the form of sketches and collages. Eventually a coloured drawing is created to scale for the size of window or piece of glass she wants to make.
My cartoon in itself becomes a huge collage.
Maud next produces a cut line drawing and it is from this point that the glass cutting begins. The glass is etched, painted, and stained. The glass is then set out like a jigsaw puzzle and lead is used to piece the puzzle together.
Stained glass has an incredibly rich, figurative tradition particularly related to religious pieces. Now, I'd like to develop that into more abstract principles which would be applied to religious areas. Also, I'd like to work in more fine art, imaginative areas as applied to public buildings like libraries, offices, stuff like that.
This episode of 'Ireland's Eye' was broadcast on 24 November 1982. The reporter is Maria Keating.
Ireland's Eye was a Tuesday-to-Friday series with human-interest stories and features from locations throughout Ireland. First broadcast on 7 October 1980, the programme ran until August 1983.
