East Window

Yesterday we went with my parents to the Family Carol Concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields. K and I used to go to concerts there quite often but we haven't been for ages - perhaps because the repertoire began to seem a bit repetitive. We certainly haven't been since the church unveiled its new refurbishment in April 2008 - already 18 months ago, and particularly remiss of us since my mother worked on that fundraising campaign. So, while I very much enjoyed the concert - sung by the London Concert Choir, with some really unusual, quite folkish songs sung by them, and the hit parade of traditional carols accompanied lustily by us - I spent quite a lot of time transfixed by the new East Window.

St Martin's is one of London's gorgeous Baroque churches, built in 1726 by the architect James Gibbs. It has a wonderful open and light interior, heightened by the recent restoration of its plasterwork decoration, and its clear glass windows. Its original windows were blown out by a bomb in the Second World War, and as part of the refurbishment the church has commissioned a really significant work of contemporary art. Artists were invited to create a work that "embodied light" and worked in harmony with the historic interior, that would "challenge preconceptions and stimulate debate", as well as encouraging reflection and contemplation. So no small task. But the winning design - by husband and wife artist and architect collaborators, Pip Horne and Shirazeh Houshiary - has really achieved this.

The stainless steel framework ripples outwards from an opaque ellipse that seems to pulse at the centre of the window. I have to say that the resemblance of the window's structure to the crucifixion is the last thing I noticed, perhaps because I am not fully alert to Christian symbolism; but of the surprisingly little information about it I've been able to find online, this seems to be the first thing that people comment on - apparently, following an uncharacteristically tepid remark by Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian about how it resembles a cross reflected in water. But the eye is drawn to the ellipse at the centre, whose oval form recalls one of the key forms of the Georgian architecture around it. All the panes in the window are lightly etched, evoking a motif from Houshiary's paintings apparently, and these etched flecks grow more concentrated the closer they come to the central oculus, so you realise there is a sort of aura around it, which represents the crown of thorns. Of course that means the heart of the window stands for Christ but there is something profoundly moving - intellectually and spiritually - about it being entirely non-figurative, non-representational. An icon for our postmodern world. And because we were there on a wintry late afternoon, we could watch the amazing transformation of the window as the sky grew dark outside...

(with apologies for the not very good iPhone images - plus, as you can see, there was a rather tall chap sitting in the row in front of me!)

As the sun goes down, the ellipse at the centre of the window glows - embodying light, as the commission invited, and a kind of mystical evocation of Christ as the light of the church, the star guiding mankind to Jerusalem at the time of his birth, all those meanings, as well as just a pan-religious symbolism of light for God. We couldn't figure out how this physically happens - is there something in the glass itself that glows, or is it subtly lit from somewhere? If the latter, then the source of this light is entirely invisible, which just adds to the mystery and the effect.

It was a highly controversial design apparently, though I can't find out online exactly why this was. Much of the commentary seems rather patronisingly to focus on the fact that Houshiary is 1) a woman (another Guardian article calls the window "gynaecological"!!) and 2) Iranian in origin: it is therefore exotic, imbued with the inspiration she draws in her art from the 13th-century Sufi mystic, Rumi, non-figurative because her art draws on Iranian artistic traditions - bla bla bla. She might be Iranian but does that mean she is Muslim? My mother couldn't remember but thought she might be Zoroastrian. Anyway, Houshiary trained and has lived and practised in England since 1974. Would she like to be labelled "exotic"?

This is a discussion that is quite current these days, with the growing debate over what "contemporary Islamic art" is, if it even exists. Most contemporary artists surely prefer to see themselves precisely as contemporary artists, practising in a globalised world without borders between artistic disciplines, rather than as "a contemporary artist from Iran" or wherever. Do such pigeon holes make Westerners feel more comfortable?

I was rather shocked to read the comment - posted by 'Highby' in response to the gynaecological Guardian article - that Houshiary "had simply applied the Iranian style. Means, no pictures of humans. Just graphical elements - lines. Arabesques. Geometrical forms". To start with, there seems to me nothing "simple" about this window. And goodness only knows what Highby thinks an arabesque is. But it also smacked of the attitude I often come across in discussions of the Islamic style in art made for Christians or Jews in medieval Spain - what has come to be called Mudéjar. For a long time, the attitude among art historians was (perhaps still is) that if an art work was in an Islamic style, it had to have been made by an Islamic artist or craftsman; there was absolutely no way that a medieval Christian or Jewish craftsman would find the Islamic style appealing and be influenced by it. This always struck me as illogical because why would a wealthy Christian patron spend money on building a church or a palace or commissioning a carpet or a geometric ceiling in an Islamic style if that isn't what they wanted in their material surroundings?

And precisely the same could be said of the St Martin's authorities who chose this window design, which is so profound and beautiful and seems to engage both mind and soul, and work on so many levels.

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Perhaps next year we'll go to the candlelit evening carol concert - the 'family concert', of course, attracts families, mainly parents and grandparents with very young children, who don't much fancy sitting still and quietly through an hour's worth of concert and don't know any of the carols (apart from 'Away in a Manger') so can't join in. There was a particularly grizzly child in the row behind us, and a general low hum of children's restlessness all around us. Still it was fun and put us in the Christmas spirit. In fact with the recent Big Chill and the fact that we have booked our train tickets to Edinburgh to visit my sister for Christmas and New Year, we've been feeling cosy and wintry for a few weeks now.

This was my sister's little car at the beginning of the week:

Almost as much snow as there is car!

The snow has pretty much all thawed now. It happened quickly yesterday. Walking to meet K at the pub on Friday evening, I was slipping and sliding over compressed snow all along St Matthew's Road, but the next morning we woke up to the sound of dripping outside the bedroom window - the sun had come back and it was a little bit rainy. Not before time - I fell down the escalators at Brixton station the other day. I had my walking boots on but it was so slippy on the escalators that there was nothing to grip onto and I couldn't get up again. I floundered for a moment until someone helped me up - I never saw who, just a voice behind me that said, 'Up you get'. My thanks to that good Samaritan.

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I'm making stock and, while I write this, wonderful smells keep wafting up from downstairs. I'm using the carcass of the lemony roast chicken we made a few weekends ago (I froze it in the meantime!) when Gareth was supposed to come round for a long overdue dinner and catch-up, but poor him, his grandmother died and he spent the weekend looking after his grandfather and helping with funeral arrangements... I like making stock: it seems like a good wintry make-do-and-mend thing to do, and a good way to use up old bunches of herbs and random bits of celery and other veggies languishing in the bottom of the fridge. We're planning to use some of this new batch of stock in the rabbit stew we'll be making in a couple of weekends' time - Cornelius and Giles are coming to share it with us. Maybe Gareth will be able to make it over too.