Voices Behind the Glass II

An Inside Look at the Sphere of Light from One of Its Visionary Creators

Welcome back to our Artist Interview Series, where each month we spotlight one of the talented artists bringing the Sphere of Light to life. Through their hands and hearts, this monumental stained-glass creation becomes more than glass—it becomes a story of humanity.

This month, we're thrilled to feature Dallin Orr, a gifted artist at Holdman Studios and one of the many brilliant minds shaping the Sphere of Light. Join us as Dallin shares his creative journey, inspirations, and what it means to be part of this once-in-a-lifetime project.

About the Artist

Q: Can you share a bit about art your background and how you got started in stained glass? I was a student at UVU studying illustration between 2012 and 2016, and I actually started stained glass as an intern on the Roots of Knowledge project. So while I was going to school there, I started an internship here on Roots of Knowledge and learned stained glass here on the job. So I brought my illustration education here, and that translated pretty well into glasswork.

Q: What inspires your artistic style and approach to working with glass? I think in my approach to working with glass, the glass itself is the main inspiration. With artwork, I like to mold myself around the task, around the problem. So with glass, I mold myself and shape myself to suit the glass rather than trying to make glass work for my style. Might be a cop-out of an answer, but glass is such a fussy medium to work with. It's very difficult because it's so fragile and because it's so technical in how you paint it and how you work with it. You have to let it do a lot of the work for you. It's like a relationship that you develop, and so my design process has really molded itself around the way glass works, if that makes sense.

Q: Do you have a favorite technique or process in your work? My favorite thing to do is move through processes and to see what sorts of beautiful things come up with different processes. I like surprises. I like happy accidents, so I like the ability with stained glass that you get to put your energy into picking glass, you get to put your energy into designing on the computer, you get to put your energy into a colored pencil drawing in a preliminary design. The way we have so many facets to the process I think is exciting as an artist to be able to channel energy into such different creative ways and then to see what beauty comes out of that and to see how that relates to a completely different part of the process. You get a dialogue going between these very different kinds of processes. You get a dialogue between picking glass and a dialogue between painting the glass. That's the exciting part. It's this movement between processes. Right now, if I had to pick one thing in particular that really excites me in the process, it's probably when we get to paint the space scenes or sky scenes, and we get to kind of spray paint on huge swaths of glass and then to make big brush strokes through the glass paint. I think that's one of my favorite effects that we get in our glass.

About the Sphere of Light

Q: What does it mean to you to be part of the Sphere of Light project? It feels important, feels natural. A very tight-knit artist team. We all work really well together. We have a great creative dynamic, and so it feels like a family, and so it feels so natural, or matter-of-fact, even. It's such a natural flow into this project with everything we did from Roots of Knowledge, building up to this, that it feels important without ever feeling like a heavy burden because of how comfortable and natural we feel as a creative group. For me, it's the opportunity of a lifetime to work with people like this on a project like this.

Q: How does your style and thoughts contribute to the story of the Sphere? If you spend a few minutes in a design office with us as a team, you might get the impression that we have competing visions or that there's a lot of conflict or back and forth about the ideation and the design process. My attitude—I like to sort of just, even if I have to pretend—I just assume that there is some sort of platonic ideal that we all agree about, even if we don't know what that is, even if we don't see it. I assume there is some sort of ideal that we all share, and then I serve that thing. I feel my way into weak points where the team might not be as strong at that point. And so I feel my way to that spot, then do something personal there to strengthen that. Sometimes it takes a long time to connect the team to that blind spot that I see. I have a sixth sense for the weak points, and I like to put my creative energy there. Then I can kind of see that the team all agrees about the concept, and then I know that it is serving that kind of platonic ideal that I was talking about.

Q: What challenges have you faced while creating your work for this project? It's a challenge between what we all want as artists—the gap between our desires and the way we communicate them. It's a real challenge to patiently and subtly navigate the ideation process in a way that you can bring out what's best in the whole team. It's important to not get discouraged when the team gives you feedback. Maybe they don't like an idea; they're not jazzed about it. It's important to assess whether they're right or whether the idea was right. It's 50/50—sometimes the team was right and I was wrong, or sometimes I still think that's a great idea and I have to rework the idea, remodel it, reconfigure it in a way that serves the team as a whole. That can be a real challenge because what we say we think about something doesn't get at the root of why we think that thing. We often have to uncover why something doesn't work before we can fix the problem.

Q: Can you walk us through your creative process for this piece? With Animus, we spent a lot of time on the design phase of this. There were a lot of iterations—we composed a lot of different variations of the figure. Really, with these two figures capturing the essence of the primordial masculine and the primordial feminine, I think it really was important that we all felt they were strong and powerful images. The first step in the process was to make these figures feel like they were coming out of the earth, they were coming out of clay, or they were being molded by some metaphorical creator. That sort of "being created out of the earth" was the concept that really drove this. And then their gestures, their poses, their colors, and their interactions—those were the sorts of things we felt along the way. To capture the feeling of the awakening into life and the different ways that can happen—with him awakening with more of a visionary kind of experience and her awakening through more of the growth and impact of the life around her, the impact on the light of her body. Those things were very difficult to refine in a way that still felt powerful.

Personal Connection & Impact

Q: What emotions or messages do you hope people will take away from the Sphere of Light? I think that at the root of it, I want people to feel like they're part of a greater whole. That there is no such thing as isolation. That no matter what, you're part of something bigger than you. That's really it.

Q: Has working on the Sphere of Light changed your perspective on art or humanity? This project in particular is very concept-driven. It's very ideal-driven—how ideals kind of relate to each other. So this has really awakened a creative ability or a creative drive to express symbol and aesthetic in a way that is experiential—in a way that exists in 3D space. I think that's super unique. As a painter, I focus on a rectangular canvas and it's very aesthetically driven, and it's very traditional in the sort of symbols that I work with in paint on canvas. But here, it's very open-ended symbolically. You really focus on what ideas are compelling and emotionally powerful, trying to maintain that power as images move through the space so that the viewer is physically experiencing something as they walk around in a circle and ascend through several floors. That movement of the viewer and the ability of the viewer to perceive the artwork in a three-dimensional space—that's super unique and is a really cool creative opportunity.

Q: If you could describe the Sphere of Light in three words, what would they be?

Ambitious. Dynamic. Massive.

Don’t forget to follow @thesphereoflight on social media to watch these interviews, meet new artists, and get the latest behind-the-scenes updates on this extraordinary project.

Until next time,

• Roots of Humanity