PAINTED HOUSES
An ongoing series exploring the house as metaphor in painted, enamelled and stained handmade glass
The house is one of the most loaded shapes we know — shelter, memory, self, belonging. This series takes that familiar form and fills it with the particular richness that only stained glass can offer: colour that lives and shifts with the light, surface that rewards looking, meaning that ranges freely between the playful and the profound.
Each Painted Houseis one of a series exploring what happens when the house becomes not a building but a vessel — a container for experience, for feeling, for narrative. Each piece in the series asks the same question differently, and finds a different answer.
All images : Stephen Heaton Photography
Pieces will be available soon Rachel Phillips Glass-Shop — Rachel Phillips Glass
Playhouse
What happens when a house becomes not a building but a vessel — a container for experience, feeling, and narrative?
Playhouse begins with the serendipity of collage: fragments brought together, surface playing against colour, the unexpected combination that turns out to be exactly right. The clean lines of the underlying structure hold all of this loosely — giving shape to forms that are deliberately less disciplined, patterns that spill and surprise.
There is something here of childhood: of games without fixed rules, of spaces that exist simply to invite you in and see what happens next.
Selected for the Fifteeen x Fifteen Exhibition at Blowfish Gallery, 2024.
Co-habitation
Five glass houses, each its own distinct presence — and yet inseparable from the others.
Each house in this collection is an exploration of individual identity: the way we construct ourselves, carry ourselves, present ourselves to the world. Transparency and opacity shift across the forms, suggesting the interplay between what we reveal and what we hold private, between lightness and the weight we bear.
But no house stands entirely alone. Placed together, the relationships between them become as interesting as the houses themselves — the tensions, the resonances, the ways each one changes how you read its neighbours. We shape one another whether we intend to or not.
Gold, sandblasted glass, painted surfaces, and bonding techniques bring beauty, ambiguity, and friction into the same space — much as people do when they share a world.
This piece was selected for the International Festival of Glass and shown at the 2024Glass Biennale.
Submarine I & II
These pieces carry two things at once — one inward, one historical. The first is personal: a growing understanding of my own nature as an introvert, and of the need to honour that. To allow space, solitude, and stillness not as withdrawal but as the condition that makes genuine engagement with the world possible.
The second runs deeper. In 1925, my grandmother lost her own mother and little sister in North Wales when a reservoir burst, sending floodwaters and boulders through their village. That event — its weight, its silence, its submersion of ordinary life — has never entirely left me and joins a wider narrative of drowned Welsh Villages.
Water and glass have always been powerfully linked in my imagination, both visually and emotionally. Light moves through each of them in similar ways: filtered, diffused, transformed. Here, enamelled, silver-stained and sandblasted glass builds up silent underwater layers of muted colour and light — the quality of a world seen from below the surface. At the centre, a small and imperfect dwelling rests quietly. It is reflected in the water around it— a moment of stillness held within something that has also known great force.
Waterlilly Houses
This piece began with a simple desire: to make a house using the forms and motifs of the waterlily.
The waterlily has always fascinated me — rooted in the underwater world I return to again and again in this series, yet reaching upward through darkness toward light and colour. It is one of the oldest symbols we have, resonating across spiritual traditions and cultures, and it carries a meaning I find personally true: that beauty and hope are not despite our origins in struggle and darkness, but because of them.
Here, that symbolism finds its home in the house — another vessel, another form of shelter and becoming.
