Debora Coombs

British artist Debora Coombs first became interested in contemporary stained glass when she was a high school exchange student in Oregon in 1974. She has worked consistently and persistently in this medium ever since, and her work has been commissioned, exhibited, collected and written about on both sides of the Atlantic, Australia and in Asia. Debora immigrated to the United States from England with her husband, Richard Criddle, their two children and the family dog in 1996. She was in the midst of a three-year project to design and hand-paint twenty stained glass windows for St. Mary’s Cathedral in Portland, Oregon, and to oversee its fabrication by a North Adams studio. Born and raised in the shipbuilding city of Southampton, England, Debora grew up at a time when British education was at a high point and developing creativity considered essential. As a schoolgirl she learned to dance, play the harp, sing madrigals, act, write poetry and make art. Like most English children, she specialized in three subjects during her last two years of high school and chose art history, English literature and studio art, which included photography, printmaking, graphic design, ceramics, drawing, painting and sculpture. Debora studied at Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Wales, and received her MFA from London’s Royal College of Art. Next she completed an informal apprenticeship at London’s largest stained glass studio, Goddard & Gibbs, where she learned her trade from wonderfully eccentric elders and by spending thousands of hours at the bench, choosing color, cutting glass, making full-sized shop drawings and designing stained glass windows. High points of this period were directing a team on the fabrication of 10,000 square feet of Islamic patterned stained glass for the Aramco Mosque in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, and receiving a Royal Institute of British Architects’ award for her windows in Betty’s Tea Rooms in York. Debora’s first solo exhibition of stained glass was held in 1994. Her next will open in March 2008 at the Jeanetta Cochrane Gallery in central London and travel around the United Kingdom, and to Iceland and New York. Her American commissions include two 25-foot high figurative windows at Marble Collegiate Church on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and the donor recognition window locally in the North Adams Public Library.