Rose Colored Windows
An art series, interactive installation, and research project inspired by traditional stained glass Rose Windows which questions traditional notions of wholeness within the body (viewing disability as brokenness) and celebrates the complexity of the human experience, hope, and resilience.
About the project:
Rose-Colored Windows celebrates the complexity of human experience and how we choose to find hope and resiliency as it intertwines with emotion, stress, healing, and more. This interactive installation of 75+ individually crafted transparent vinyl works is inspired by stained glass “Rose Windows” which were meticulously crafted in their designs to elicit feelings of awe and wonder and let in light in buildings of worship built throughout the Medieval and Gothic periods. These mosaic tessellations often broached complex subjects such as The Universal Laws of the Cosmos, the human psyche, and celestial planes of existence. And in the spirit of those original pieces, this work, entitled “Rose-Colored Windows” looks to cast the same reverence as the source inspiration, but this time towards the complexity and multifaceted endeavor of living within a human body. Facets of life, like the struggle of living with mental and physical health challenges intertwining with themes of hope, experience, and resilience. Each uniquely drawn vinyl design represents layers of life, positives and negatives, hopes and fears, struggles and triumphs, and invites the viewer to create their own combinations to add to the larger kaleidoscope. Individually, these window pieces were each deliberately designed to defy organized perfection and welcome incidental beauty: never perfectly fitting in the gaps of the next, oftentimes overlapping, sometimes creating new designs and colors and often creating muddiness and obscurity. Never meant to be a puzzle to solve, each window was created to be a physical manifestation of the awe-inspiring, non-linear journey of our mental fortitude.
Looking for new locations to exhibit this interactive installation, contact for inquiries.
Past Versions:
Chehalem Cultural Center
Feb- June 2025
Rose-Colored Windows
Rose-Colored Windows celebrates the complexity of human experience and how we choose to find hope and resiliency as it intertwines with emotion, stress, healing, and more. This interactive installation of 75+ individually crafted transparent vinyl works is inspired by stained glass “Rose Windows” which were meticulously crafted in their designs to elicit feelings of awe and wonder and let in light in buildings of worship built throughout the Medieval and Gothic periods. These mosaic tessellations often broached complex subjects such as The Universal Laws of the Cosmos, the human psyche, and celestial planes of existence. And in the spirit of those original pieces, this work, entitled “Rose-Colored Windows” looks to cast the same reverence as the source inspiration, but this time towards the complexity and multifaceted endeavor of living within a human body. Facets of life, like the struggle of living with mental and physical health challenges intertwining with themes of hope, experience, and resilience. Each uniquely drawn vinyl design represents layers of life, positives and negatives, hopes and fears, struggles and triumphs, and invites the viewer to create their own combinations to add to the larger kaleidoscope. Individually, these window pieces were each deliberately designed to defy organized perfection and welcome incidental beauty: never perfectly fitting in the gaps of the next, oftentimes overlapping, sometimes creating new designs and colors and often creating muddiness and obscurity. Never meant to be a puzzle to solve, each window was created to be a physical manifestation of the awe-inspiring, non-linear journey of our mental fortitude.
Rose-Colored Windows
At Sisters Coffee in the Pearl for the month of May, sponsored by Cascadia Healthcare for their HEART celebration and Mental Health Awareness Month
Rose-Colored Windows celebrates the complexity of mental health and how we find hope as it intertwines with emotion, stress, brain chemistry, our nervous systems, healing, relationships, and more. We want things to be simple and easy, transparent, perfectly fitting together, but the reality is that, when it comes to mental health, it’s not, it’s complex, and layered, and so much of the struggle isn’t visible, and there is a beauty and reverence in that that deserves to be honored and praised. This installation is inspired by stained glass Rose Windows which throughout history have represented universal laws of the cosmos and the psyche, serving as representations of wonder and awe at heaven. But in being human, we are beings who encounter all the different facets of living with mental and physical health challenges, like depression, disability, grief, loneliness, psychosis, addiction, and more and our ability to find hope again, process, experience, and move forward, especially as women, shows a resilience that deserves to be marveled at. This is what these individual Rose Windows represent, they are physical manifestations of the awe-inspiring, non-linear journey of our mental fortitude.
Each layer’s design doesn’t perfectly fit with the next, they often overlap, sometimes creating new designs or colors and oftentimes creating muddiness and obscurity. And this parallels our experience of being human- we idealize control, planning something so well that it all fits together or works out, but this installation is built to be varying, responsive, and adaptable, just like our experience is. There is no puzzle to be solved, no perfect combination that shows each of the designs and colors perfectly, the beauty is in the dynamic and developing complexity.
We traditionally think that looking at life through ‘rose colored glasses’ is a naive or bad thing, but for so many people experiencing mental health challenges we are fighting to see the world with a little bit of rosyness- hope and compassion, and that is something to be celebrated.
