About the Film

This science and art documentary film follows Through a Glass Darkly, a collaboration between the AHRC-funded Ordered Universe Research Project, Durham University, the University of Sunderland and the National Glass Centre. The wider Ordered Universe partnership also draws in researchers from the University of Oxford, Georgetown University, Bishop Grosseteste University and the Università di Roma Tor Vergata, though this particular strand of work centred on Durham and Sunderland. Over a series of seminars, manuscript visits and studio sessions, historians, scientists and glass artists worked through the thirteenth century writings of Robert Grosseteste on light and colour, and the film documents that process alongside the exhibition it produced, Illuminating Colour, shown at the National Glass Centre.

Robert Grosseteste and the Ordered Universe Project

Robert Grosseteste was Bishop of Lincoln in the early thirteenth century and one of the more unusual minds of the medieval period, writing on theology alongside genuinely original scientific treatises on light, colour, sound and the cosmos, well before anything resembling modern science existed as a separate discipline. The Ordered Universe Project, led from Durham, brings together historians, linguists and physical scientists to translate and properly understand these Latin texts, treating them not as historical curiosities but as serious attempts at explaining the natural world that still repay close reading today. Through a Glass Darkly grew out of that project’s longstanding interest in bringing artists into the same conversation, on the basis that a good many of Grosseteste’s ideas about light and colour are, in the end, easier to grasp through material and image than through translation alone.

Grosseteste’s De Colore

The particular text behind this collaboration is Grosseteste’s De Colore, a short treatise arguing that colour is what happens when light is taken up into a translucent medium, glass, water, air, each one inflecting the light differently depending on its own nature. It is a strange and quite beautiful piece of reasoning for its period, closer in spirit to an experiment than a sermon, and it gave Cate Watkinson and Colin Rennie, both Senior Lecturers in Glass at the University of Sunderland, a genuinely workable starting point rather than an abstract theme to illustrate. Professor Giles Gasper, Reader in Medieval History at Durham and one of the project’s lead academics, sums up why glass in particular suited the task so well:

“Glass is a fantastic metaphor for the whole thing. It’s such a wonderful substance. It’s malleable, it’s brittle, it allows you to see through it, it can distort, it can cloud entirely, or it can be opaque or translucent. That’s a very good example of the creative process, a very good example of how we do history, how you approach the past.”

Illuminating Colour: The Exhibition

The collaboration ran across a series of knowledge-sharing seminars and hands-on studio sessions before settling into a body of new glass artwork responding directly to Grosseteste’s writing on colour and, in a related treatise, the rainbow. Cate Watkinson describes the resulting pieces plainly, as works based on Grosseteste’s writings on colour and on De Iride, his treatise on the rainbow. Multi-media sculptor Alexandra Carr, projection artist Ross Ashton and photographer Rosie Reed Gold were also part of the wider creative team, alongside students and staff from across the participating institutions. The exhibition, sponsored by the National Glass Centre and the University of Sunderland with additional support from the AHRC and Durham University, brought that material research into a public gallery space where it could be encountered directly rather than only read about.

Why a Documentary, Not Just Photographs of the Work

A finished piece of glass artwork photographs well enough, but it tells you almost nothing about the argument that produced it, the false starts, the reading, the arguments in seminar rooms about what a Latin verb actually implies. For a project like this, built on genuine cross-disciplinary conversation rather than a single commissioning brief, a static image of the final exhibition would have lost most of what made the work worth doing in the first place. Making a science and art documentary film out of it meant I could follow the thinking as well as the making, sitting in on seminars, filming manuscript visits to Durham, and spending time in the Sunderland studio as the glass itself was worked, poured and shaped around ideas that were still, in places, being argued over.

Filming an Interdisciplinary Collaboration: My Approach

Projects like Through a Glass Darkly ask something slightly different of a documentary filmmaker than a single interview or a straightforward event film. Nobody involved was performing for the camera, and my job was mostly to be patient enough that they largely forgot it was there, staying in the room through long seminar discussions and slow studio sessions rather than parachuting in for a few set-piece quotes. That meant filming across several separate sessions over an extended period, at Durham University’s Department of History and Palace Green Library as well as at the National Glass Centre, and building enough trust with a fairly large group of academics and artists, across several institutions and disciplines, that the conversation stayed honest on camera.

The harder part of a project like this is usually editorial rather than technical, deciding how much of a genuinely complex academic argument a general audience can follow without either drowning them in detail or flattening the ideas into something glib. I try to resist the second option in particular. Grosseteste’s thinking on colour is subtle, and the value of a film like this is in giving people enough of that subtlety to feel it was worth their attention, not in reducing it to a soundbite about medieval scientists being surprisingly modern. In practice that means long stretches of listening before filming properly starts, and a willingness to let researchers and artists find their own language for what they are doing rather than steering them toward mine.

What the Collaboration Meant to the People Involved

What comes through repeatedly across the footage is how unfamiliar this way of working was to almost everyone involved, in a good way. Colin Rennie, more used to translating scientific ideas into physical form than sitting inside a live research project, put it simply:

“There’s common ground that we can all find and communicate on. It’s been fascinating being a scientist as part of this project, because it’s opened up a whole new world and ways of thinking that have been totally outside my previous experience.”

Projection artist Ross Ashton, meanwhile, had never encountered Grosseteste before joining the project, and his reaction is a useful reminder of how this kind of film can work as public engagement in its own right, introducing genuinely obscure research to people who would otherwise have no route into it:

“I’ve never heard of Robert Grosseteste. I suppose I’m not alone in that. It was a revelation to me to find that this man had been putting forward these ideas so long ago, and when you read the translations, they seem incredibly modern.”

Science and Art, Not Science or Art

By the end of the project, Giles Gasper had come to see the collaboration as evidence for something he suspected all along, that the usual divide between science and the arts is more a matter of institutional habit than necessity:

“What it’s done for me is to invigorate my idea that science can benefit from art just as much as art can benefit from science, that these two fields don’t need to be two fields.”

That idea, that a science and art documentary film can sit usefully between the two disciplines, doing something a journal article or a gallery label cannot quite do on its own, is a large part of why I keep being drawn to this kind of academic and creative collaboration. For a research project, a film like this can work as a genuinely useful public engagement and impact output in its own right, giving colleagues, funders and the wider public a way into work that would otherwise stay inside seminar rooms and specialist publications.