How was the artwork made?
A Moment of Peace is a stained glass panel made entirely using heritage craft techniques. The concepts of the panel were co-designed alongside the women of Mornington Women’s Group in a number of workshop sessions. Then, Kerrie set to work in her studio sketching ideas from the co-design prompts, before the cutline and cartoon was drawn up and glass was cut for each section.
Once the glass was cut it was brought back to Mornington Community Centre where the women had the chance to try stained glass painting techniques to create the outlines. Once back in the studio, Kerrie began adding shading layers across a number of kiln firings before the panel was leaded together.
A Moment of Peace is a co-designed stained glass panel created in collaboration with the Mornington Women’s Group for Belfast City Council’s Belfast 2024 Project.
The work uses the map of Belfast as its foundation, placing a female figure at the city’s heart, a personification of the spirit of Belfast herself. Her flowing hair and arms form the rivers Farset and Lagan. Around her, familiar motifs of place appear: the map lines of the city combined with shoots of new growth as symbols of renewal and optimism.
The woman’s tattoos- a dove of peace and a radiant sun, carry messages of hope, reconciliation, and resilience. The artwork celebrates the women who sustain and shape their communities, reframing Belfast as a site of care, connection, and collective healing.
A Moment of Peace was also reproduced across bus stops and billboards throughout Belfast, allowing the work to exist both as public art and as a shared moment of reflection within the rhythm of daily life.
Tell me about this project…
This project was commissioned by Belfast City Council as part of Belfast 2024 as a way to explore how co-design can be embedded as part of developing ideas for built heritage in Belfast. It was a hands on way for people to get involved with an endangered craft process, learn something new and build a sense of community.
What are the concepts behind the image?
The concepts behind this piece are quite varied and really explore many points of view, but all tied together by the idea of taking a moment to reconnect with yourself, and your inner world. The composition of the piece is based on the shape of the roads within the map of Belfast, with the map cutting and blending in to the overall composition.
The woman really is an embodiment of Belfast itself, with hair flowing like the river Farset and the river Lagan flowing through her arms right down to the Ormeau Bridge at the bottom, beside Mornington Community Centre.
The barbed wire as a nod to Belfast’s past at the bottom being washed away by the rains with new life springing up, and the tattoos of the dove of peace and sun, a nod to a new beginning.
Most of all, this panel reflected our time as a group, taking a few hours for ourselves every week to reconnect to our creativity within the hustle and bustle of everyday life, taking a breath, taking a moment, and wanting to share this in the imagery we explored.
