(Editor’s Note: Carlyn Ray created Gathered Radiance, the new installation in the Abilene Heritage Square Library. She writes about the spiritual aspect of creating art, especially in community.)

By Carlyn Ray

One of the reasons I am drawn to glass is because it brings me into the light. It teaches me to listen to my inner voice and to what I believe is the presence of the Holy Spirit moving within us.

As an artist, I have come to believe that some of the most meaningful forms of creation happen not in isolation, but together. That belief has become central to my work, especially in public art projects like Gathered Radiance, the new installation created for the Abilene Heritage Square Library.

Gathered Radiance, a sculpture at the new library at Abilene Heritage Square, was a community creation. Photos courtesy Turk Studio.

Rather than simply placing artwork into a community, I wanted this piece to emerge from the community itself.

Throughout the process, local residents, students, families, and members of The Grace Museum participated in creating elements that are now permanently woven into the sculpture. During workshops at The Grace Museum and within my Dallas studio, people of all ages decorated glass pieces, experimented with color, and became part of the creative process. Their individual contributions now live within the final installation, suspended together in light.

To me, there is something deeply spiritual about that.

Carlyn Ray assists with the installation of her sculpture at the new library in Abilene Heritage Square.

Glassblowing itself feels inherently connected to creation. Glass begins as sand, earth transformed through immense heat, then shaped through breath, movement, gravity, and human touch. There is something ancient and sacred in that process. In many ways, it feels like breathing life into dust.

When I work with hot glass, I enter a kind of meditation or flow. The material glows with light and energy, and the process demands complete presence. I become immersed in the heat, rhythm, movement, and trust required to shape something both fragile and alive. Another part of what first drew me to glassblowing was the teamwork, the way people move together around the light, supporting one another, celebrating successes, and experiencing failures together. There is a deep human connection within the act of creating glass, a shared energy and presence that has always felt meaningful to me and is something I deeply love to share with others.

That spirit of collaboration mirrors something larger about community and about life itself.

Judy Godfrey paints a ribbon as part of Carlyn Ray’s sculpture at the new library. 

We often speak of light symbolically, as wisdom, hope, guidance, or the presence of the divine. But light only becomes visible through interaction. It appears through reflection, transparency, and connection. In many ways, we illuminate one another through compassion, creativity, openness, and shared experience.

Over time, I have come to feel that we ourselves are vessels, shaped through experience, hardened or softened through struggle, stretched through growth, and illuminated from within. Even the fractures and darkness we carry can become places where light moves through more deeply.

That is what I hoped Gathered Radiance could hold, the light from within each of us.

The sculpture rises through the library’s atrium in a vertical journey of color. Golds and yellows at the base move into cooler blues and eventually into rich oranges and reds above, reflecting growth, learning, exploration, and lived experience. Mirrored forms woven throughout the installation invite visitors to see themselves within the work, reminding us that we are all part of the larger whole.

The setting itself feels meaningful to me as well. Libraries are sacred spaces in their own quiet way. They gather stories, knowledge, imagination, memory, and discovery across generations. They are places where people come not only to learn, but to connect with ideas, with one another, and sometimes even with themselves.

To create a collaborative artwork for a library felt deeply aligned with that purpose.

As I spent time in Abilene throughout this project, I was continually moved by the warmth, faith, and generosity of the community. What remains with me most is not only the finished installation, but the many moments of participation along the way: conversations during workshops, students experiencing glassblowing for the first time, families creating side by side, people sharing stories while shaping color and light together.

Those moments reminded me that art can do more than decorate a space. It can create space for reflection, for connection, for belonging, and for wonder.

I believe collaboration, at its best, is a spiritual act because it asks us to move beyond ourselves. It asks us to listen, to trust, to contribute, and to recognize that something larger can emerge when we create together.

Perhaps that is part of what light is meant to teach us.

Are we willing to let the light move through us? Not just reflect it, but embody the light? Surrender to the light? 

And how, together, we might illuminate one another.

Carlyn Ray is a Dallas artist and creator of Gathered Radiance, the new installation in the Abilene Heritage Square Library.