During the pandemic, James designed a stained-glass window for St Mary’s Church in Wivenhoe, titled Blue Boat and Dove. For its central image he chose a traditional work boat – echoing the sturdy, practical vessels he had once helped to build and sail during his apprenticeship. Set beneath the dove of peace, the boat becomes a symbol of shelter, purpose, and collective journey, grounding the window in both local maritime heritage and spiritual metaphor.
Fittingly, the main body of a church is called the nave, a word derived from the Latin navis, meaning “ship.” Across centuries, the church has been imagined as a vessel carrying and protecting its community through uncertainty – an idea given renewed poignancy in James’s design, created at a moment when people everywhere were seeking steadiness and hope.
He worked on a commission to design a stained-glass window for the new public hall
adjoining St Mary’s Church in Wivenhoe where he now lives. The result was a glowing
image of a blue boat, ‘a vernacular work boat similar to the type I helped to build and sail
during my apprenticeship to represent the church with the dove of peace above.’ For him
it is no accident that church architecture takes much of its design typology and symbolic
language from that of sea-going, a shared vocabulary that Dodds returns to frequently
when writing about his work.
Ken Worpole – exert from Love is a Boat 2026 catalogue.
Blue Boat and Dove was commissioned for the new annexe and meeting room at St Mary’s. The building was designed by Inkpen & Downie – the same architects who remodelled Tollesbury Congregational Church, where James created an earlier stained-glass window in 1991. That earlier piece was a circular internal window composed of stained and painted quadrants surrounding a clear glass cross.
The new Wivenhoe window was fabricated by Stourside Glass in Harwich, while the stained-glass work for Blue Boat and Dove itself was carried out by Andy Brooke and Pascale Penfold in Dumfries, bringing together skilled hands across regions to realise the final luminous design.
Browse the gallery below to explore the finished piece, along with behind-the-scenes images documenting its creation.
James Dodds 