The stain-glass windows of the Kitengela glass artist Nani Croze are to be found all over Nairobi.
They are especially visible in churches and chapels like the one at Consolata School in Westlands where she created the amazing 15 Stages of the Cross which are some of her most classic windows.
A pioneer in producing stained-glass windows in Kenya, the German-born Nani admits she wasn’t the first person to make stained glass in Kenya.
A Scandinavian artist worked briefly in the country, but after she left, the vacuum was filled when Nani, who was a painter and muralist at the time, decided to learn how to start working in stained glass.
“It was my friend [and architect] the late George Vamos who advised me that as a single mother who had children to raise, I would be better off working in glass than painting in oils and acrylics,” she says.
She took his advice and shortly thereafter went to London to understudy with British glass artists.
A committed conservationist and environmental activist, Nani has created most of her multi-coloured windows with recycled glass bottles.
She continues to receive beer and soda containers on a daily basis at her Kitengela Glass and Research Centre where she’s constructed several jua kali furnaces for melting and blowing glass.
Assisted in their construction by a Finnish glass blower, Nani resisted importing glass from abroad until she realised she could branch out into other styles of stained glass using colourful glass blocks called dalle de verre, which she now uses alongside her hand-blown glass.
Her most recent work, a magnificent stained glass dome is one, like the increasing numbers of her windows, commissioned for a palatial private home in Karen which will also serve a dual-purpose as a business premises for the owner, who wished to remain anonymous.
But Nani is quite pleased with the dome which is a mixture of dalle de verre and recycled glass and was a real feat to install.
Today, in contrast to her early years, Nani works with a team of local people that she’s trained and who assist her with the installation work and also serving as drivers and glass cutters-blowers as well as installers.
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