Stained light: inside a Perth artist's Subiaco church panels

Walk into St Brigid's on a winter morning and the first thing you notice is not the altar or the timber pews. It is the colour. Long washes of cobalt, antique green and amber spill across the nave as the low Perth sun pushes east, and the air feels thicker for the patterns moving across it. The effect is the work of one maker: Perth glass artist Iris Larkin.

Larkin works from a small studio behind a weatherboard house in Maylands, on the eastern edge of the river, where the morning kookaburras tend to out-sing the kiln. She trained as a painter at the Victorian College of the Arts before pivoting to architectural glass during a residency at the JamFactory in Adelaide. That single-mindedness now defines a practice running the length of Western Australia, with commissions in private homes, civic buildings and the occasional reverent chapel.

Subiaco, the inner-city parish where her panels are now anchored, is the kind of place where design conversations happen without anyone quite calling them that. St Brigid's itself is a modest inter-war brick church, refitted over the decades in ways that have not always been kind to it. Larkin's commission, completed in late 2024 across three lancet windows, is the first serious piece of contemporary craft to enter the building in living memory.

Her story lands at a moment when Western Australian design is having one of its louder reckonings with itself. New residential work in the Perth hills and along the Fremantle coast is being photographed for international architecture press, the Perth Design Festival has settled into a confident rhythm, and platforms like Contemporary are documenting the slow accumulation of a regional voice. Stained glass sits at an interesting junction within that conversation: deeply traditional, technically exacting, and quietly able to do what most contemporary art cannot, which is to behave like architecture, day after day, for a century at a time.

From a Fremantle shed to glass school in Adelaide

Larkin grew up in Fremantle, in a family that ran a small architectural metalwork business out of a shed on Queen Victoria Street. As a teenager she spent Saturdays polishing brass and watching her father solder hinges for heritage restorations in the West End, which gave her an early sense that craft could be both decorative and structural. She left Perth at nineteen for the Victorian College of the Arts, intending to become a painter, and for several years she made work that owed more to the Australian tonalists than to anything in the applied arts.

The pivot came during a 2018 residency at the JamFactory in Adelaide, where she was placed in the architectural glass studio. She had expected to be bored by the discipline. Instead she found herself drawn to the way a panel forces decisions about light, weather and human scale that a canvas does not. Australian light in particular is harsh and low-angle, and a stained panel has to be designed for the way the sun actually moves through a room, not the way it appears in a photograph. Larkin came back to Perth with a clear idea that she wanted to make work that lived inside buildings, not beside them.

She set up her first proper studio in a converted laundry in Fremantle in 2019, and began taking on small commissions for residential clients restoring Federation-era homes. The work was intimate: a single roundel for a stairwell landing, a set of door lights for a re-clad Queenslander in Cottesloe. None of it was publicly visible, but it paid the rent and refined her hand. By 2022 she had moved east across the river to Maylands, where she still works today, and had begun to think seriously about a church-scale piece.

The Subiaco commission and what the parish wanted

The St Brigid's commission began, as many Australian heritage projects do, with a building code and heritage assessment. The parish council had been trying for almost a decade to address water ingress along the south aisle, and the restoration eventually folded in a rethink of the original leadlight, heavily repaired in the 1980s with acrylic substitutes. The diocese wanted something that could replace the synthetic sections, restore the building's acoustic warmth and, if possible, mark the parish's centenary in a way that felt artistically serious rather than commemorative.

Larkin was approached through a recommendation from the architect overseeing the broader restoration, a former classmate now based in West Perth. She spent three months on site before any glass was cut, sitting through morning services, charting the angle of the sun across the seasons, and reading the building's archive. The original 1920s designer had left almost no documentation, so much of her research was forensic. She worked from fragments, surviving glass and old parish bulletins, gradually reconstructing an iconographic language the building could support without becoming a museum of itself.

The final scheme runs across three lancet windows of the south aisle, each roughly two and a half metres tall. The palette is restrained: a deep cobalt at the base, shifting through antique green, then opening into a thin, almost-translucent amber at the apex. Larkin designed the figural elements to draw on the maritime and pastoral imagery of the original draftsman, while the surrounding ground is treated in the kind of streaky, painterly glass she is increasingly known for. The result is less a set of pictures than a slow-weather system for the room, which responds to the famously clear Perth sky by intensifying on bright summer afternoons and softening in the grey of a June front.

How a panel is built, from sketch to lead

Larkin's studio practice is closer to a small factory than to a painter's garret. A typical commission moves through several defined stages: a long period of design at full scale on brown paper, the cutting and painting of mouth-blown glass sourced from a supplier in Melbourne, careful kiln work at controlled temperatures to fire the grisaille and enamels, and finally the leading, soldering and waterproofing of the assembled panel. Each stage is unforgiving. A misjudged firing can distort a face. A misaligned heart can let water creep in and slowly frost the inside of the glass, the kind of failure that takes ten years to become visible.

She works almost entirely with mouth-blown antique glass, which carries small variations in thickness that read as richness once the sun is behind it. For the Subiaco panels she specified a mix of Artifique and English antique that the Melbourne supplier held in deep storage, glass that would have been familiar to the original 1920s designer. The leading is traditional lead came, sanded and cemented in the European manner, with a discreet external capping that the parish can access for cleaning without dismantling the windows.

This kind of slow, layered work has its own economy, and Larkin is honest about how it intersects with the realities of running a household in middle-class Perth. Long lead times mean clients need to plan around them, and the wear-and-tear thinking that goes into her glass is not so different from the decisions homeowners make elsewhere in the house, including the practical question of carpeting stairs with pets, where durability matters as much as finish. She is quietly proud that her glass has to perform on the same terms.

A small Maylands studio and the rhythms of a solo practice

The Maylands studio is a single long room at the back of a 1920s bungalow, with a north-facing window, a small electric kiln in a lean-to, and shelving along one wall holding flat files of every commission she has produced. It is small enough that she can stand in the middle and touch both walls, and Larkin is candid that this is, in part, a deliberate choice. She could take on a larger space, hire assistants and chase a more industrial output, but the discipline of doing everything herself, from initial sketch to final cementing, is what she believes gives the work its character.

Solo practice in Perth's inner east has a particular texture. Maylands is a suburb of quiet streets and post-war brick homes, well-served by the Midland line and close enough to the city for Larkin to walk to meetings in Perth proper. The rhythm of the week tends to be shaped by her kiln schedule: two firings a week, each one dictating what can be painted and cut in the days beforehand. She has learned to schedule site visits, parish meetings and supplier runs around that cycle, and to defend the longer stretches of uninterrupted studio time as the non-negotiable core of the practice.

That working pattern is familiar to many craftspeople in the inner suburbs, and one she sees mirrored in the makers next door, including a ceramics artist working out of a converted garden shed on the same street, in a setup not unlike the Maylands ceramics studio profiled on Contemporary last year. She trades technical advice with two other glass makers in the Perth hills, swaps kiln time with a small bronze foundry in Osborne Park, and keeps an informal lunch once a month with a handful of architects, designers and craftspeople working in the Bayswater–Maylands corridor. The conversations are not networking in the corporate sense, but they keep her work honest.

What comes next for Larkin and the WA glass community

Larkin has, by her own description, a deliberately light forward diary. Two further ecclesiastical commissions are in early design, one in the Perth hills and one in regional New South Wales, both small enough to be made in her existing studio without expansion. She has also begun teaching a short architectural glass elective at a Perth-based design school, which she sees as a way of ensuring the technical infrastructure she relies on, particularly the small pool of specialist glaziers and leadworkers she subcontracts, does not quietly disappear between her commissions.

She is also one of a small cohort of Western Australian designers and makers being showcased at this year's Contemporary Wine In Design, the annual networking event that brings together the Perth architecture and design community at a single venue for an evening of tasting, talking and looking. Larkin will show a pair of new panels made specifically for the event, smaller in scale than her church work but executed in the same painterly glass, and the chance to see her practice alongside the architects and interior designers she usually works for is part of what makes the format valuable.

For now, she is content with the size of the studio and the shape of the work. St Brigid's panels are settling into their first full year of public life, and she is still adjusting to the fact that strangers send her photographs of the light inside the church on a Sunday afternoon. There is a slight bemusement in her voice when she talks about this, the kind that belongs to a maker whose work has started to belong to a place rather than to her. That, she suggests, is the moment a stained panel has actually succeeded: when the artist becomes a footnote and the room remembers the light.

Contemporary documents Western Australia's design community across residential and commercial projects, public spaces, product launches, industry events and the practices of the architects, designers and makers shaping the state's built environment. To follow Larkin's ongoing commissions and the wider WA glass community, and to secure a place at this year's Contemporary Wine In Design, subscribe to the platform's editorial newsletter and explore the events calendar.