Burns’ Night is to many of us the great winter feast, an occasion to celebrate not only the life and works of the Immortal Bard, but to reinforce a worldwide sense of community embodied in his songs and poetry.  For the last few years I’ve been making a series of artist’s books as contemporary illuminated manuscripts, taking as a theme the turning year and the dance of the seasons, and Burns’ poetry has been a great inspiration.

Seasons Dancing is a concertina book that opens out to form a standing circle, a continuous double-sided ring of words nearly 5 metres in circumference, with a flowing, lilting circle of lines from Burns’ poems evoking each month page by page and joined at the turn of the year, flowing onward like a sound wavelength, following the cycle of the year – regular, repeating, ever new; it folds down to a manageable largish book.

Burns’ Year: Love and Freedom is in the form of four books, one for each season.

Each of the four books is made from a single sheet of handmade paper (at 2 metres x 80cm, some of the largest handmade paper in the world, made in India by Khadi Papers), torn and folded into a sequence of pages, but readily reformed to its whole state, unfolded and opened out to spread before you this sacred space open to all, like a magic carpet that transports you to another time and place, but which you can also fold up and carry about with you – the essence of ‘book’, in fact.

In the four books that make up Love & Freedom: Burns’ Year, some of Burns’ ideas about inequality, oppression and dispossession (‘how things are shar’d'), his profound sense of home and exile, and his awareness of the solace of love are bought together by means of his characteristic association of radical politics and the consolations of Nature (‘free alike to all’).

Themes of fragmentation, dispersal and restoration/reconstruction are present not only within the texts and the form of the books, but also within the materials and making processes: like the threads of a woven plaid, the flocculating molecules of the clay body, the fragments and scraps of paper pulp reform to a unity in the great sheet; like the bricks in a wall, or the parts of a musical score, the individual elements are reconstructed to wholeness.

Each book follows on from the one before, as do the seasons. In Winter Wild, the dispersal of autumn hardens into a solid state, in a setting of Burns’ poem O, wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, mapped and contained by the plaid (based on the Lennox tartan, to reference the tune for which Burns wrote this song, Lenox love to Blantyre). The fragments come together and resolve to a paradoxical equilibrium, the icy wind countered by the protecting plaid – a rather slight defence, we may feel, but time- honoured.  Here is the book, page by page:

As you’ll have seen, I’ve worked with fine thin colours, an icy silver grey and some delicate threads of wintry sunlight, the small marks defining the threads of the plaid made with the same driftwood twig that I used for the lettering. I’ve aimed to use the colours to reflect and respond to the colour and mood of each line, each word of the text, as one would in setting a text to music. To balance the different colours of the text both phrase by phrase and within the overall whole image is very important for how the book works in its dual character.

The colour palette of the four books is essentially the same, concentrated or diffused in tone according to the season’s particular light, and with a characteristic hue added for each season: silvery grey for winter, golden yellow for spring, azure for summer and russet for autumn. This colour is highlighted on the individual slipcase for each book, with its linen draw-tabs, and brought together in the box which houses the four books.

I’ll be describing each book in detail as the seasons turn throughout this year, as well as showing some more pages of the months from Seasons Dancing.

Both Seasons Dancing and Love & Freedom: Burns’ Year are now part of the National Library of Scotland‘s collection of artists’ books.

I love the image of John Clare’s wassail singer telling her winter tale; she’s one of  many women whose songs, poems and stories I’m celebrating this season in my new exhibition, River songs in winter, at Woolfson & Tay in Bermondsey Square, near Tower Bridge. In this gallery within a bookshop beside the river, surrounded by books and words and volumes and images, I’ve brought together a collection of river songs from the water’s edge, a winter’s tale of the riverbank.

 

The Thames is my Ur-river.  Most of my life I’ve lived beside it: as a child in the 60′s playing on the toxic concrete shores at Long Reach, and in my teens totally immersed in the green leafy stretches further upriver. My partner the writer Frances Bingham is a lifelong Londoner, and after university we came straight back to London to start our life and work together, setting up our first studio here in 1986.

Later, when we came home again to London after living for a while by the sea, Frances and I stood together on the winter embankment watching a great ship slowly setting off downriver, and felt the tidal force of the river running through our life as it runs through our city.  For many years now the most homelike stretch of the Thames for us has been the reach from Waterloo Bridge down to Greenwich, and the river still retains its tidal tug; we hear the river’s voice; we read the river’s words.

Rather as a composer sets poetry to music, I work with fragments of poetry or a flow of words that to me express the essential form and volume of the individual work I’m making, whether it’s a vessel or an artist’s book or a driftwood sculpture. This exhibition includes all three, juxtaposed so that the relationship between the forms is evident:

My work is about containment and connection: the natural materials formed and shaped by water and the cosmic transformation of the fire re-enact the elemental processes of nature that form the earth and our own bodies.

Working with text is a way to examine how the light shows through, how the materials and process are given life and meaning by thought and words.  Our artists’ film Riversoup continues this balancing act of text and form with a sequence of still images about constant movement reflecting a poetic text that follows the journey of the tidal Thames from the Pool of London to the sea, and back again.

I always enjoy site-specific exhibitions, where the work relates closely to the showing environment, and the gallery at Woolfson & Tay is a beautiful bookish space, with incidentally a lovely cafe, so that you can sit to contemplate the work in warmth and comfort.

River songs in winter is on from 29th November, throughout December until 8th January 2012, open daily except over Christmas. Please see W&T’s website for opening times and details. It’s a selling show, so you can buy off-the-wall to take away immediately, and as each artwork is a signed original one-off, the show will be changing throughout the month as sold work is replaced.

John Clare’s poems for the Autumn months in his Shepherds Calendar are among the most beautiful of the year, as well as the most entertaining – his accounts of nutting and other active pleasures balance the customary melancholy of the season, and this year particularly the Autumn weather has been so ravishing that it’s been hard to feel gloomy. And now that we’re on the very edge of winter, with the first frosts and foggy mornings, our thoughts turn to the snowy delights to come.

This year I’ve been thinking even more than usual about the passing of time, the turn of the year and the dance of the seasons. In August I delivered some artist’s books to the National Library of Scotland, and had the great pleasure of unfolding the four great ‘carpet books’ that make up Love & Freedom: Burns’ Year for the curators to experience.

The four books are each made from a huge sheet of handmade paper (Khadi’s great white – at 2m x 80cm among the largest handmade paper sheets in the world), painted, lettered, torn and folded into a sequence of pages to form a book, but possible to unfold and reform to the single huge sheet.

One of my aims for these books is that they should work both in terms of a single image composition on the whole sheet, as well as through the sequence of individual pages:

I’ll be featuring these books in detail throughout the year in 2012, season by season.

Meanwhile we’ve been preparing for our winter exhibition, which this year is in the gallery at the award-winning Woolfson & Tay bookshop in Bermondsey Square in London, close to the south foot of Tower Bridge. River songs in winter is a collection of my new work in clay, handmade paper and driftwood from the Thames, including artist’s books, wall-hung banners in clay and driftwood, and some lovely pots. For more details, have a look at the page about the exhibition on Woolfson & Tay’s website, and I’ll be writing about it here in December. It’s a selling show (so you can buy off the wall to take away), and it’s on from 29th November right through December until 8th January 2012, changing throughout the month.

August was to John Clare a pivot of the year, as the harvest drew a concerted effort from everyone in the rural community, and the ‘bustling day’ took precedence over everything else – until it was done, and time to celebrate. This large serving dish from the Shepherds Calendar dinner service is a centrepiece of the plate rack, with its warm appetising colours and the beautiful text. Here’s the back:

Though we’d rather like to hang out in the sunshine (now some’s finally here) throughout August, it’s going to be rather a busy month for us too, as we’re taking some of this year’s harvest to Edinburgh. My partner Frances will be reading from her acclaimed new novel The Principle of Camouflage at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where it is also an entry for the Festival’s Newton First Book Award – and as it has also been suggested as a possible contender for the Guardian First Book Award this year, it’s receiving a lot of attention for a book from a small publisher. Frances is also reading in the Festival’s Amnesty International Imprisoned Writers series, from the work of Nizametdin Akhmetov, a Bashkir poet.

On the same trip, we’ll also be delivering some of my work to the National Library of Scotland; I’m very proud to say that the NLS is acquiring three of my artist’s books, Season’s Dancing (with text by Robert Burns), Love and Freedom: Burns’ Year (a group of four books, one for each season), and Light Music (from a text by Margaret Tait).

This is the August page from Seasons Dancing, a concertina book made from 24 sheets of handmade paper (A3) which opens out to a continuous circle joining December and January, and celebrating the cyclic dance of the seasons with fragments from Burns’ poems.

The ring of months is double sided, so that as it stands opened out, you can see the months in sequence on the front, and inside, the rhythmic flow of the turning seasons:

The outer pages are painted and collaged month by month, and the pages on the inner side are made with handmade papers in different colours for the flow of the seasons, with Burns’ text dancing round:

Here you can see the December page (And O for the joys of a long winter night) linked to January (That merry day the year begins) – and so on round the year.

Round and round the seasons go

This year I’ve been working on a series of contemporary illuminated manuscripts reflecting the passing of time and the turning year. The largest works (so far) are the group of four books that make up Love and Freedom: Burns’ Year which will also be in the NLS collection; these four books are each made from a single huge sheet of handmade paper, torn and folded into a sequence of pages, but possible to restore to the whole sheet again, like a magic carpet that transports you to another time and place, but which you can also fold up and carry about with you – the essence of ‘book’, in fact. I’ll be writing more about the ideas behind these books (and showing how they look) in September; meanwhile you can see Light Music with its luminous text from Margaret Tait’s film Colour Poems in a page by page sequence in a Work in Focus post – click here.

If you’d like more information about any of my work, please leave me a note in the comments box below, or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

The swallows are here, and though the weather’s uncertain, at least it’s real summer. John Clare’s birthday falls in July, and we like to celebrate with dinner outside, eating from the dinner service with inscriptions from his Shepherds Calendar. The July bowl shows Clare’s characteristic quirky spelling and punctuation, and is decorated with jasmine, honeysuckle, evening primrose and peas, in honour of a fragrant evening in the garden.

Most summer evenings when we sit out, we’re treated to a dazzling display of aeronautics from our local swifts, and one of the great joys of hanging out by the summer river has always been the swallows doing their thing.

Swallows on the Thames is a one-elephant book, made from a single sheet of handmade paper, painted, torn and folded into a sequence of pages. The whole sheet looks like this:

and the beautiful cool summery text by Matthew Arnold winds with the flow of the river:

In my boat I lie,

Moor’d to the cool bank in the summer heats,

‘Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills

Where black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames

I’ll be showing this artist’s book in an exhibition this winter in a riverside gallery in London, to remind us of the summer river in those December days. More details of this exhibition next month, when I’ll also be showing some more of my current series of contemporary illuminated manuscripts on the theme of the dance of the seasons and the passing year.

If you’d like more information about any of my work, please leave me a note in the comments box below, or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

With June, true summer begins. John Clare’s lines from A Shepherds Calendar (June poem) capture for me not only the sights and sounds, but the feeling of the month.

We are enjoying being back in the studio after our maytime excursion to the Ice House in Holland Park, where my Watermark exhibition was the first show of the summer season. This month, I’d like to give you a tour of the exhibition, to show how it worked in that beautiful space.

This image of one of my driftwood sculptures was on posters throughout the park, leading to the Ice House.

The entrance to the Ice House.

The exhibition had 60 works in clay, handmade paper and driftwood, in two rooms, a square entrance hall and a round inner room like the inside of a great pot:

All of the work was connected by the theme of water, in the poems, in the materials, in our bodies, and running through our lives, from source to sea.

Source was the first work in the exhibition: made from Thames driftwood, with the lettering of the text carved and incised with the woodgrain:

Implicit in each beginning is its end.

(Kathleen Raine)

A dish made from a slab of clay, with the perhaps unwise inscription:

I am the poem of earth said the voice of the rain

(Walt Whitman)

Living water, a waterfall in clay with a vivid text by Vita Sackville-West flowing down like leaves down a stream.

Into the inner room, and in the middle, a Persian garden with goldfish and a large pool bowl, The voice of the river, with a beautiful text by Frances Bingham:

I am the voice of the river singing in your dreams

A lullaby of waters, a litany of streams

The first group of works around the circular space had several artist’s books made from a single sheet of handmade paper torn and folded into a continuous sequence of pages. The idea is that the image works both as a whole, and page by page in the book:

This form of book, where the text moves round in a continuous circling flow, and the paper, though shaped by hand, retains its wholeness, has for me some structural relation to the pots thrown on the wheel, and the spiralling setting of their text. I enjoyed showing visitors the way that the book opens page by page, and then reforms into a whole image.

The next group of works included some more of these artist’s books, including one called Inland, with a beautiful text by Wordsworth:

and a tall jar and paperwork, with texts by TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf:

On to the middle group:

where the central work is Tree-river-river-tree:

Here the image in four parts develops with the text, in a four-way reflection.

My own image reflected in the glass of the frame, as I photograph a paperwork with one of my favourite texts:

I am the daughter of earth and water

(Shelley)

The next group in the inner room centres on another artist’s book and a group of Water vessels:

Because I love, there is a river flowing all night long

(Kathleen Raine)

And the last group round the circle included two driftwood sculptures:

All things, with a text by Vita Sackville-West:

and Stream wash away, with a text by Kathleen Raine:

and Love flows, a tall bowl with a beautiful text by Frances Bingham:

In the middle of this circular inner room was a long cabinet containing concertina artist’s books, opened out to their full extent:

with Kingfisher, a brilliant text by Richard Price, in the end frame.

We return to the outer room for the last groups in the exhibition:

These pots and paperworks were shown on the brick chimney-piece of the Ice House, and included a group of Three phosphorescence pots with white-gold lustre:

three bowls with Valentine Ackland’s poem Idyll, written in Spain during the Civil War:

and six spheres with 9ct gold lustre:

And then the final group of works, or coda:

An artist’s book Coda, with text by Matthew Arnold

Another waterfall in clay, with text this time by Valentine Ackland

A pair of artist’s books, with beautiful texts by Frances Bingham:

And, finally, on the open door, the last work in the exhibition:

A little further

we will see the sea

breaking into waves

(George Seferis, translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard)

John Clare’s May poem in his Shepherds Calendar evokes the delights of this lovely month, and here I’ve set a fragment of text around the flared rim of a salad bowl, garnished with may blossom, flowering rosemary, dill and early lavender. This bowl is part of our dinner service, which has a plate or bowl for every month, and I’m starting each month’s post this year with the appropriate piece. Everything seems to have come early this year, including May itself, and we will be ‘mingling in the warmth of May’ in Holland Park, as my new exhibition Watermark opens on 7th and closes on 22nd May, presented in association with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

The Ice House gallery is a beautiful space, a one room house built in beautiful brick with a cone-shaped tiled roof. Planning the exhibition for the space has seemed to me like working within a great pot.

Here is the catalogue text, with images of some of the work:

WATERMARK by LIZ MATHEWS

THE ICE HOUSE IN HOLLAND PARK

Kensington High Street, London W8

7 – 22 MAY 2011 daily 11am – 7pm

Here, in a house of clay made for ice, beside the pond in this green space, we have an awareness of the pattern of water drawn on the world, of the sap in the trees and our bodies, the falling rain, the great river flowing through the city, the surrounding seas. Watermark looks at the patterns floating on the surface and dowses for the undercurrents.

I work with clay, driftwood and handmade paper, all materials full of this water – or the marks it has left - seeking to reveal both the character of the material and the transformative process: the clay’s original wet soft malleable state and the action of the fire, or the dried paper’s light-filtering qualities and the once-wet ink’s determination.

The earth/clay/body link is fundamental in my work: our place within the landscape, the elements, the seasons, time, the flow of the water. I like to examine how the light shows through.

Text is of the essence. I use lettering as an architectural framework, mapping, enclosing and entering the volume contained.

Marks on the surface lead the eye to the inner space – not only within the vessel form but also inside the planes of wall panels or the layers of paperworks – circling towards the heart of the matter.

Containment, the relation between the outer surface and the inner volume, is expressed through an engagement of text and image, finding the letters in the grain, catching the words in the current, floating them on the surface of the deep.

I liken this process to that of setting poetry to music, with the same implication of translation, and the same integration of words and form. Setting a text or poem in this way gives both an immediate visual apprehension, and a slower, more contemplative reading which can lead to an enhanced awareness of the text and its relation to the form. Also, for me there’s always an element of performing the text in the making process.

I work with white stoneware, natural found materials (such as driftwood from the Thames) and re-purposed materials (copper pipes, hemp sash-cord) with related qualities. I also work with handmade recycled cotton rag paper (khadi) making artist’s books and paperworks, again with structural concerns related to my claywork, particularly in a flowing or circling sequence of pages.

I welcome chance contributions from the process or the quirks of found materials, the changes and patina added by time, and I like themes to surface in a sequence of related works, rather than prescribe too much.

(unexpectedly, I found a whole flock of kingfishers, for example)

I paint freehand onto the raw dried clay with a brush, in underglaze metal oxides; then some surfaces - perhaps only inside – are glazed; on some pots I use 9ct gold lustre.

On paper I paint in watercolour, acrylics and inks, as well as natural pigments and raw materials – charcoal, beeswax, salt, sand – and I use random mark-making tools – wooden peg, clay shard, slate fragment, flint, feather, and only now and then a brush.

My favourite lettering pen is a small driftwood stick, picked up on the Thames beach by the Southbank.

Liz Mathews   Potters’ Yard  2011

For more information about Watermark or any of my work, please leave me a note in the comments box below or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

As always, please don’t use any of these images without permission.

Now that Spring is really here, and in John Clare’s happy words

The trees still deepen in their bloom

Grass greens the meadowlands

And flowers with every morning come

we can really start looking forward to the arrival of the swallows and swifts, since the daffodils have already dared. I love the changing lengthening light of Spring, and the suddenness of the long-awaited transformation, when everything charges out at once.

I’m continuing work on my series of Books of Hours, or contemporary illuminated manuscripts, on the theme of the passing year, working with different forms of the book. Some of them are very large, but The turning year is made from a single sheet of handmade ‘elephant’ paper (70cm x 50cm), torn and folded not into my usual cyclic sequence of pages, but this time as a continuous flow, starting at one end and following a fluid timeline which pours off the other end. The full sheet, before tearing and folding looked like this:

and the sequence of pages like this:

This was a lovely sheet of paper to work with, as it had beautiful irregular deckle edges, with even a few tags of paper floating at the corners. I particularly like the lively uniqueness of each handmade sheet, and enjoy including its quirks into the book’s character. The torn and folded sequence of pages looks like this:

My preoccupation with rivers, seas and watery places is reaching flood level as I prepare for Watermark, my exhibition in the Ice House gallery in Holland Park, which is open daily from 7th to 22nd May, 11am to 7pm.

I’ll be showing waterfalls in clay, driftwood signposts, several kingfishers, fountains and storms, tall ships and circling seas, as well as Van Gogh’s clouds and swallows on the Thames – and during May I’ll be showing some of the works in the exhibition here in my May post.

Meanwhile, I have been doing some other work, including a very enjoyable commission for a portrait of a thatched cottage, in my ongoing series of architectural low-relief sculptures.

I’ve been making these for 25 years now (my first was in 1986), and I must have made many hundreds by now – I love the individuality of each subject, and really enjoy how a likeness develops through the process, so that the finished portrait becomes a very tangible image of the house. I made this one in terracotta – the same clay as the bricks – but I use stoneware for a stone-built house. I have made a portrait of a Swiss log cabin, but I did it in clay, rather than matchsticks. Some more examples can be seen on the Architectural reliefs page, and commissions start at £200. I welcome enquiries about commissions – you can leave me a note in the comments box below, or if you prefer, click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

John Clare’s ‘tale of spring’ is a very encouraging beginning to the month, promising an imaginative glimpse of what’s to come. His delight in the narrative ballad of the seasons is a constant inspiration in my work, and I love the idea of the story of the turning year. Translating this deeply familiar theme into words that strike us as fresh each time we read them, and accurate, John Clare transforms a time-honoured, repetitive trope into a work of art that captures the essence of individual experience, universally, giving us back something that we’ve perhaps lost or forgotten.

This idea is the inspiration behind my Books of Hours, contemporary illuminated manuscripts contemplating the movement of time and the mystical dance of the seasons through fragments of poetry, exploring different ways of translating the text into objects of illumination. This month I’m working on Seasons dancing, setting Burns’ poetry of the turning year – which I’ll be showing in these pages next month. Meanwhile, I’ll show you the March page from Singing the Year, with text by Vita Sackville-West, with just a glimpse of February past and April to come:

Capturing the feel of a text that in itself is vividly visual is a very exciting challenge to me, and one that it’s not easy to define in terms of actual process or techniques. I try to let the light through from the text, rather than illustrate it. In the Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy last summer, I overheard a puzzled visitor say ‘It’s just marks, isn’t it?’  And later in the year, when we were revisiting the sacred texts in the John Ritblat Gallery containing some of the most precious treasures of the British Library, another overheard remark was ‘These are just stories’. Marks and stories is just what we do.

A painting of mine is the cover image for The Principle of Camouflage, my partner Frances Bingham’s new book (a literary novel, coming out in April this year, and available now from Two Ravens Press). I painted Sea light in response to the story, rather than as an illustration to it; I was aiming to catch the fleeting luminous quality of the light, and something of the particular space and atmosphere evoked.

I used a board with quite a rough ground, prepared many years ago by Frances’ great uncle, the artist Guy Worsdell, who had a studio at St Ives and whose paintings and woodcuts (though not often landscapes) are drenched in that light. I like to think that some of it comes through my overlaid marks.

Maureen Duffy has said of The Principle of Camouflage:

A true work of the imagination, transporting Prospero’s isle, and us, to wartime Britain on a shining wave of sea images.

and this vivid imagery has inspired several other works of mine, including a small group of elephants (artist’s books made from a single sheet of handmade paper, painted, torn and folded into a sequence of pages). Sometimes the setting of the text seems like a form of performance – a way of inhabiting the text in the moment, not unlike reading it aloud, in the way it concentrates the mind on the form and flow of the words while making the marks. I will be showing some of these books in Watermark, my next exhibition, at the Ice House Gallery in Holland Park during May (I’ll be adding full details here soon) and meanwhile I’ll give you a preview of one of the books, called Storm.

Before tearing and folding, the sheet looked like this:

And after, like this:

I’ll be adding details about Watermark next month. Meanwhile, if you’d like more information about any of my work, please leave me a comment in the box below, or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

The February plate from my dinner service (with text from John Clare’s Shepherds Calendar) reminds us to hope to see a few drowsy bees on fine February days.

The accuracy of John Clare’s observations of nature reminds me of Vita Sackville-West’s great poem The Land, and her intimate knowledge of her particular bit of England:

In February, if the days be clear,

The waking bee, still drowsy on the wing,

Will guess the opening of another year

And blunder out to seek another spring.

I wrote last month about my project for the year, a series of Books of Hours or contemporary illuminated manuscripts; I’ve begun with a large-scale book called Singing the Year, with text from The Land celebrating the cycle of the seasons and their ‘recurrent patterns on a scroll unwinding’.

The February page here shows a clear frosty starlit night in recognition of the pleasures of the season, rather than sleepy bees, but the poem also warns us:

Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep,

For winter’s big with summer in her womb.

So I’ve been making a few spells for the bees, while they sleep, in the hope that they will resume their summer vigour for another year:

Blessing the bees in winter is a very ancient tradition:

I found the text for Skep in the Greek Anthology; it’s by Diodoras Zonas, in a translation by Alistair Elliot. I particularly like the invocation to the bees themselves, encouraging them while simultaneously discreetly removing their stores. The text is lettered on a large sheet of creamy-white handmade paper, with a pen I cut from a piece of Thames driftwood, and an ordinary wooden peg.

Thrive adapts a text by Apollinides (from a translation by Peter Whigham in the Greek Anthology) in a paper construction made with different handmade papers reflecting the layered cells in the hive. The lettering is set to evoke the movement of the bees among the cells, regular, orderly but individual, singing. This time the text avoids mentioning the inevitable theft and confines itself to powerful words of blessing and encouragement. Amen to that.

Returning to the theme of the pleasures of the season – what Burns refers to in his line:

And O for the joys of a long winter night

- February is also of course the perfect moment for one of the great celebrations of the year, the feast of St Valentine, ‘the start of true spring’. Love is the theme of much of my work:

This group of pots includes a large celebratory wine jug, based on the inscription (by Lorenzo di Medici):

Viva Baccho, e viv’ Amore

- roughly: Long live Bacchus, and long live love! Amen also to that.

These two wine jugs both celebrate love. On the left, John Clare’s

Tis womans love makes earth divine

and on the right, the encouraging proposition from Thomas Shadwell:

Come let us agree there are pleasures divine

In wine and in love, in love and in wine.

And behind them, Burns’ blessing on a large dish:

Thine be ilka Joy and Treasure,

Peace, Enjoyment, Love and Pleasure.

Night is a One Elephant book made from a single sheet of handmade paper (70cm x 50cm), torn and folded into a sequence of pages, with a deeply sexy text from Spenser’s Epithalamion:

The text is set onto the blank sheet of paper, and then painted over, to give that feathery, floating effect. After painting and folding, but before tearing, the sheet of paper looked like this:

These books can be shown like this, framed on the wall, or folded as books, so that they can be read and handled, turning the book as the text follows the cycle of the pages.

Another of my One Elephant books very appropriate for the time of year is Amo Ergo Sum. Kathleen Raine’s profound and simple poem was the starting point for this book, where the text flows outward from a steady, glowing core, source of everything good, all-powerful, wholly benign:

The text here is lettered over the painting; before the lettering, it looked like this:

And once lettered, but before tearing, like this (you can see the sequence of the pages flowing out with the text from the core):

And once folded and torn, like this:

This beautiful text was also the inspiration for one of my new River Vessels:

This tall bowl is full of midnight blue, with the text lettered inside and out:

Because I love, there is a river flowing all night long.

Most of the work on this page is for sale, prices ranging from £75 for the Womans love wine jug to £500 for Skep. My One Elephant books are usually £300 – £400 each, with small elephants about £150 each, including individual slipcase. Every piece is a one-off, unique and original signed artwork. To find out more about any of my work, please leave me a note in the comments box below, or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.