Nick currently has an exhibition at the Courtyard in Hereford.

I design and make contemporary stained glass windows for public buildings, business premises and private houses. I aim to produce works which are sympathetic to the building and its function, whilst exploring themes and ideas in new ways. My designs encourage the viewer react with each window and become involved on different levels - visually, emotionally and spiritually. I make my windows using the finest mouth-blown stained glass, acid etched, painted, stained and fired, assembled with lead.

Nicky Hopwood
The Old Thatch Cottage
Brockhampton
Hereford
HR1 4TO
01989 740265

Half a mile north of my home in Brockhampton, which I share with Jane and our two dogs, is Capler Camp, an Iron Age Hill Fort situated 400 feet above the Wye.  For me, it is a focal or meeting point of many ancient paths and also connects the tracks between those involved in this project.  I walk on the camp at least every other day throughout the year, sometimes alone, sometimes with Jane and it is nearly always quiet and empty of people; there are no signs and few waymarkers, just sheep and buzzards, rabbits and pheasants, some open spaces and many mature trees. It is a space for contemplation.

Capler is timeless and full of contradictions:

• A very natural yet entirely man-made landscape which would not be as it is without intense human activity over at least 3000 years.  Early settlers dug and fortified , created and inhabited the space; late custodians have farmed the land with care and planted and harvested the trees.

• It is teeming with life and revealing of death; foxes and buzzards take rabbits and pheasants, storms fell ancient oak and beech.

The Trackways to Remember project is giving a chance to respond to an area which is familiar but always surprising, to reflect my liking for maps and contours and things I see and find on my walks.  It is also a good opportunity for exploration in a separate context from my usual commissioned work.  The two stained glass panels have made do not represent a major change of direction in my work; they run parallel to it and I look forward to seeing where this project takes me next.

I have used footprints to symbolise the relationship between the human and the landscape; they are timeless and the first people to walk these paths would have been barefoot.  The colours are the actual colours of the land and the view – green and brown and gold, violet/blue and misty white.  The river nudges the foot of the hill, mostly unseen but a constant presence.

The windows are mostly quite heavily painted, partially and frustratingly obscuring the light (although the light and the richness of colour are still there to be found) and the darker panel in particular has a brooding feel.  Perhaps the darkness has to do with the lack of light in the wood in winter, a shrouding of the area according to season or mood or personal circumstance; and this becomes more apparent in the second panel where there is a brightness in the imprints, a tentative optimism to be explored.

As an artist who normally works by absorbing and processing and responding to buildings and the people who use them, it is good to have the chance to respond to the area and reflect the place through the eyes of the other artists, archaeologists and storyteller in the group is stimulating and fun.