Saint Albert has been giving Frances Biggs a lot of trouble. She is trying to create his image in stained glass but nothing is inspiring her. "I was a long time coming to grips with Albert - I had nothing in common with him. I'd never even heard of him," she says. When I first met Frances - or Franco as she is affectionately called - over a year ago, she was even then struggling with St Albert. His is the last in a series of eight stained glass windows she has been working on in the Chapel of the Martyrs for the Carmelite Order in Terenure, Dublin, for the past three years.

Perhaps she has also been missing the supportive input from her husband, the sculptor, Michael Biggs, who died in 1993. Together they created some of the most impressive ecclesiastic art of recent decades - he in stone and she in stained glass or tapestries - in such churches as St Macartan's Cathedral, Monaghan, and Gonzaga College Chapel, Ranelagh.

"When given a subject I want all the material I can lay my hands on," she says. "I research and research, reading everything about the subject. From that I get my images and I begin to visualise the design of the window. First I work with a Biro to get the stark outline of the lead lines, what kind of composition I can make. Then I begin to think of colours - once the colours come, I'm gone.

"The design, called a cartoon, is coloured in chalk to a scale of two-and-a-half inches to the foot. After that the glass has to be selected and cut. I've worked with my glazier Dermot McLoughlin for so many years he knows the colours I want. The cuts of coloured glass are placed between the numbered lead lines. It's a long, slow and complicated process."

Frances Biggs's emergence as one of the country's foremost stained glass and tapestry artists came about entirely by accident, because she had been quite happy playing violin in the RTE Symphony Orchestra - of which she was a member for 40 years. Music has surrounded her all her life; not classical at first but big band music and Dixieland jazz. Her father, Michael Dooley, was a well-known bandleader in the 1940s and 1950s, and the tradition is continued today with several of her brothers and nephews prominent on the jazz scene in Galway.

Born fifth of 10 children in Salthill, Galway, Franco's ambition was to play classical music. Never having had a professional lesson in her life, she won a scholarship to the Royal Irish Academy of Music and at the late age of 17 began the rigorous training demanded of a music student. Living in spartan conditions in Dublin but fuelled by determination, she supported herself in various part-time jobs, practising violin six hours a day - until overwork and under-eating landed her in hospital. On her recovery she got easier livelihood as a model in the College of Art. "Modelling only my head and hands, nothing else!"

Her stoicism was rewarded when she was offered a place in the Radio Eireann Orchestra, where she was to remain for the next 40 years until her retirement a few years ago. When her beloved Michael died and with her children grown, Franco sold the house in Dundrum that had been her home for four decades and moved back to her native Galway.

Life with Michael Biggs had been exciting and turbulent. They had five children to provide for and her income from the orchestra was the bread and butter of their existence. Michael was slow and painstaking at his craft - which includes such literally monumental works as the inscription wall at Arbour Hill Cemetery with its carving of the 1916 Proclamation. He has been described as "the high priest of stone" by Father Eltin Griffin (who was later to commission the Carmelite windows from Frances) for his carvings of altars, ambos, fonts and sedelias for many churches in Ireland.

While listening to, or playing music, Franco had always visualised the sound in colours, "seeing" varying shades and tones in the different instruments of the orchestra. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin had devised a scale of colours in relation to particular notes; similarly Franco Biggs began to paint pictures whose colour composition reflected the tinctures of the music she imagined in her head.

"When I hear a flute I see a blaze of silver or blue, depending on the key; the cello makes me see claret; the violin is blue and silver with deep brown on the lower notes going into purple; the brass section is bright yellows and orange, and the woodwind produces muted colours."

LATER, she reproduced these "sounds" in vivid tapestries, such as Homage to Mozart, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, and Playing New Music, the sounds represented by pastoral shades or a cacophony of colours. In time, her religious tapestries would attract the attention of the Catholic Church just as her stained glass did, and she began to receive commissions for tapestries, her most prestigious commission being the joint venture with her husband for St Macartan's Cathedral where their brief was to adapt the sanctuary area from its neo-Gothic style to suit the needs of the modern Catholic liturgy, to bring the clerical area "down among the people".

But how did a woman working full time as a member of an orchestra, rearing five children, the youngest of whom was autistic, manage to combine the further artistic and physical demands of creating stained glass windows and massive tapestries for churches?

"Michael was working night and day. I'd come home from the orchestra and had nothing to do. I hated housework, it bored me, I was much more cerebral. I didn't mind cooking and I had a nanny to help with the children - my wages from the orchestra paid for that. My brain was always flying, I've always had excessive mental energy but I was too tired to read after reading music all day, though I did read to the children."

Somehow returning to painting didn't appeal - she'd had a solo exhibition in the Dublin Painters' Gallery on St Stephen's Green that had been favourably reviewed, and which included two pictures with a religious theme. Possibly that triggered the notion of learning the craft of stained glass art.

"We had a two-hour lunch break in the orchestra during which I'd go the College of Art on Kildare Street for an hour every day. This was while Michael was working on the interior of Gonzaga College Chapel, where my boys went to school. I used to watch him work but it never occurred to me that I'd do the windows. "I just began playing around with ideas. I can't see a blank space without visualising an image on it. No one had been chosen to do the windows at that point so I thought I'd do something for a bit of fun."

So impressed was architect Andy Devane when he saw her sketches that she was awarded the commission. So began a working relationship between Frances and her husband that would produce art which inspires and challenges the beholder, where the spiritually uplifting effect can be both devotionally pious and agnostically artistic, whose creations link the past with the future.

Although bereft of Michael, and past retirement age, Frances Biggs continues to produce superb works in stained glass and woven wool. "How could I stop working? What else would I do?" she asks frankly. "Work occupies me. I get great satisfaction when it's finished - for a short while - then I'm saying `what next'."