County glass artist Sarah Hall was formally invested into the Order of Canada by Her Excellency Governor General Mary Simon at a ceremony at Rideau Hall on October 26. Ms. Hall is the first woman glass artist to receive the Order of Canada.

Ms. Hall actually received the award in 2019, but the pandemic delayed the ceremony. It was worth the wait.

“It was humbling and exciting. It’s not like any other award. I’ve worked quite a bit internationally and this really felt like this is about Canada. It brought home for me a lot of my love of Canada and being a Canadian.”

Ms. Hall’s international career began with training in Europe. Increasing demand for larger scale creations led to work in the United States and Canada. Ms Hall was based in Toronto, but worked from coast to coast. By 2015, she found, “I was at a point in time where I could move to a more peaceful place. I decided I wanted to do more writing and perhaps some teaching on the art history of stained glass. I wanted to stop traveling for a little. I’d been back and forth between sites maybe 50 times — and I have a family!”

And so, she and her husband settled in Picton.

The scale of Ms. Hall’s stained glass is hard to conceive. It is of architectural proportions, the installations of great size and complexity. They either enhance an existing building, or inform the design of a new structure.

Such work is not achieved in isolation. There is of course back and forth communication with the owner of a building commissioning a work of art — and communication with the building itself.

“In my very earliest days the clients were giving me a lot more direction, but as I had more work to show I also realized that it was important to bring them on a journey with me. I would go and listen to them, and then to the building. Then go back to my studio and create the designs.”

Ms. Hall’s designs work within architectural parameters (e.g., requirements for safety and environmental standards), and, in their execution, a team of chemists, glaziers, and installers realize the designs in place.

Ms. Hall is often commissioned to design windows as a building is being conceived, and works alongside an architect. But she also designs for older buildings, the oldest a window for a 13^th-century church in Germany. In either case, “it has to sit in the building like it’s always been there.”

Unlike a painting, which can be moved all over the world and displayed in a multitude of contexts, “the window is really made for that very particular place, like a mosaic or a fresco.”

“It also marks a time,” she added, which it communicates to the future. The sense of history and place that informs her work has parallels in the various parameters of the practical role a glass window must fill. For example, Ms. Hall has been working with engineers on a prototype for bird-friendly glass that will also collect solar energy. “There are creative and ingenious ways to do things,” she notes. An artist can “find a way around the problems.”

In her shift to a more rural setting, and alongside the unexpected pandemic lockdowns, Ms. Hall turned to writing and teaching. This summer she published “Glenwood Chapel – Secret Societies and Their Stained Glass,” an engaging history of the historic chapel’s windows.

She is also wrapping up a series of Sunday afternoon discussions on stained glass, hosted at the Waring House. The series been successful, and she promises to do it again.

“I’m enjoying it tremendously,” she said. “I’ve just found that people are so engaged. It’s a conversation and it’s wonderful to have people to talk to; I’m teaching but I’m also listening. The other day somebody said something about rose windows that in all these years had not occurred to me — but it was perfect!” She finds the experience analogous to her artwork. “After a window is in and I’m looking at it in a kind of time of critique that I give myself, there is something that I had not been able to imagine was an impact.”

“There’s no other medium like stained glass, because light passes through it, and when it passes through colour it inevitably makes some kind of atmosphere.” Unlike some of the more didactic, storytelling windows, modern stained glass is more open to interpretation, and, as with Ms. Hall’s environmental innovations, responsive to the contemporary world.

In the medieval tradition of the rose window, it does not teach a lesson, but gives “a sense of wonder.”