- Christian Waller Stained Glass: Towards the Light, by Caroline Miley. Australian Scholarly Publishing, $150
Although Napier Waller is a household name in Australian art and is famous for his monumental murals, mosaics, stained glass and paintings - and, in Canberra, most would be familiar with his mosaics and stained glass for the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial completed in 1958 - his partner Christian Waller has faded from prominence.
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Christian Marjory Emily Carlyle Waller (1894-1954) was an amazing artist, a mystic and thinker aligned with the Theosophical movement, and a printmaker of national significance. She was the first Australian artist to illustrate Alice in Wonderland (1924). In 1932, she designed, cut, and hand-printed The Great Breath: A Book of Seven Designs and designed the fairy tale, The Gates of Dawn. These are now seen as landmark artworks in Australian printmaking.
However, her main art form was stained glass, which was a very unusual medium for a woman artist at the time and she was prolific and in high demand. Before the publication of Caroline Miley's book, few people had any idea of the breadth and scope of her practice. Now we learn that between 1927 and 1953 she completed over 100 individual panels of stained glass for numerous churches and universities, primarily in Victoria and New South Wales.
Christian's husband outlived her by almost two decades and his new wife did much to eradicate all traces of Christian's work with pieces reattributed to her husband and her role in collaborate work minimised.
Miley's forensic efforts have restored Christian Waller's opus to its full glory and an image emerges of an exceptionally creative individual who survived in poor health, who was flooded with orders and for much of her life struggled in solitude.
Christian Waller may be described as a Christian believer and the vast majority of her work was for Christian ecclesiastic institutions, but her work was not stereotypically standardised in its imagery, as was much of the stained glass production in Australia at the time. She was, at least in part, guided by Madame Helena Blavatsky's mystical ideas of Theosophy and owned a copy of Blavatsky's epic publication, Isis Unveiled. The iconography of many of her window panels is immensely complex and encoded with ideas of sacred numerology and mystical colours.
She was an artist of her time and worked within the conventions of the Arts and Crafts movement that she experienced in her studies in Ireland and Britain. Stylistically, she owed a debt to many prevailing trends including Art Deco, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Germanic Jugendstil movement. She also understood the intrinsic qualities of working in glass as opposed to thinking of glass as a surface on which to make a design.
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She wrote in 1931, "There is an opening to fill, not a picture to make; the flatness of the wall should remain unbroken, and light must enter the building. It may come through in beautiful patterns, in rich, glowing colours ... but first and foremost it must look glass - it must be a window ... the design must be 'thought' in glass ... The window is a minor part of the complete structure, so its lines and character should conform architecturally with the whole building." It is this understanding of the organic wholeness of the structure that is one of the endearing qualities of Christian Waller's windows, the other is her use of colour.
Miley, in a beautiful passage writes, "The colours are usually strong and clear, sensual dark turquoises, peacock blues and greens being matched with Siennas, red-browns, pale yellow-browns and occasional flashes of mauve-pinks. The windows contain balances of powerful sweeps of angular leaded sections of streaked, etched or matted glass set off by finely painted sections, for example in the hands and faces of figures."
In recent decades, there has been a torrent of publications that have sought to resurrect the reputations of neglected women artists. Miley's book is different from most of these. Firstly, it examines the work of a female stained glass artist, a very rare phenomenon for the time. Secondly, it is meticulous in its scholarship; Christian Waller's imagery is carefully and painstakingly decoded, her use of colour and developing styles are carefully analysed and the sequence of commissions is carefully studied. There is included a special section by Geoffrey Wallace into the artist's techniques.
Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, Miley has assembled a comprehensive catalogue of all of Christian Waller's stained glass commissions, stained glass drawings and a timeline so that all subsequent publications can build on the foundations of this one. In this sense, it is a landmark publication that is comprehensive in its documentation and illustrations.
In the 12th century, the great French churchman Abbott Suger, on completion of the east end of his church with its stained glass windows, wrote: "It seems to me that I see myself dwelling as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of earth nor entirely in the purity of heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner."
In her most successful stained glass windows, Christian Waller achieved that rare feat of spiritually transporting the viewer from the material plane to a spiritual sphere of existence.
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