JOHN CLARK

John Clark won the competition overwhelmingly. The reasons for their unanimous decision were illuminating. They illustrated Clark's method of working, his very specific gifts, his strong commitment to 'meaning', and the way he makes a powerful connection with those commissioning his art.

John had truly immersed himself in the subject that this window was intended to memorialise - the dead and the living veterans of the Falklands War.

Several of the judges had been actual participants in the War. They were captivated by John's presentation because it soon became clear he had profoundly comprehended something of what they had experienced at that time. And, more importantly, he had managed to translate this into a visual language that became part of both the form and the content of his design for the Chapel window.

His window expresses a real sense of the endless sea journey through the vast southern oceans towards those barren mountainous islands. A journey being made by many who had never have faced real battle before; a journey towards an unknown place where an unknown fate lay waiting. His window captures this experience, one that perhaps only those involved in the actual conflict would know. He shared it with all.

The panel were in no doubt whose design to select. And I felt I came to understand something of how John Clark works. For him research is not about collecting fragments of data and then stuffing references to them into a picture. It is about trying to come to understand an experience and then finding a way of capturing this in a two dimensional visual image, while at the same time bearing in mind the surrounding architecture, the shape of the window itself, how the lights falls and so on. A stained glass window design can be quite a complex synthesis of requirements. John Clark invests the time into the subject, so that both the form and the content of the window become self-evident.

John's great natural ability is as a draughtsman. But this is a talent that can be a double- edged sword, both gift and danger. A window can easily sink into mere illustration, or its content can supercede its architectural role. Over the last decade John Clark's windows have become increasingly architectural, while still retaining the potency of meaning that makes them so relevant to specific people and to specific places.

An architectural window performs as a background to a space - like music that creates atmosphere without specific content. Frequently this is achieved with abstraction, but this often leaves the viewer with too little meaning or content. It is in this balance of form and content that John Clark's work has achieved real excellence, and that makes him such a satisfying artist for those who initially planned to commission a window.

Andrew Moor, Author of Contemporary Stained Glass & Architectural Glass Art, Dec. 1999.