There are places where the light just behaves differently.
Step into Durham Cathedral on any bright day, and you’ll see what I mean. Here, the stained glass doesn’t just decorate—it illuminates. The sun pours through stories etched in colour, casting pools of ruby, sapphire, and gold onto stone floors worn by centuries of footsteps. It’s as if the Cathedral itself is painting with light.
There’s a kind of hush that falls when you see it. Not silence, exactly, but something close to awe. A kind of stillness and reverence which makes you look afresh at the familiar world, caught off guard by beauty, by the perfect physics of those beams of light, by the quiet choreography of colour and shadow.
I enjoy gazing at the rose window, a perfect circle whose shape is reflected high in the vaulted arches. Often the light is very soft or fleeting and it feels like a secret. A soft echo of pattern and symmetry. The window hovers, untouchable, a floating halo in stone and glass. For a moment, the building seems weightless.
The way light moves in here is part of the architecture. Not just a happy accident. Someone, long ago, understood how the sun would sweep through the seasons and built accordingly—knowing that one day, you and I might walk in and feel something shift inside us.
And that’s the wonder of it, really—this interplay of permanence and transience. Of stone and sky. Of human hands and something quietly but powerfully transcendent.
So next time you visit Durham Cathedral, look not just at the windows, but at the floor. At the walls. At the people around you. You’ll find light lingering there too.
I am honoured to have been invited to create an artwork inside this awe-some space: The words that bind us will launch on 11th July 2025 — a luminous animated light-projection artwork forming part of the Magna Carta and the North exhibition.
This poetic imagining of a more positive society will reinterpret the spirit of the Magna Carta for the world today. Become part of this collective vision of a ‘Modern Charter’ by visiting my online word collection portal, now live and informing the words and phrases I select for the final artwork.
With thanks to @BeneathTheBells for allowing my use of his wonderful photographs
