Invocations

Invocations is a series of large-scale works on reclaimed wooden doors and panels, combining clay tiles, sections or fragments with the beautiful forms of the wood, which are sometimes Victorian doors, sometimes old oak cupboard doors, sometimes wooden wine boxes.

Invocation in 72 fragments has torn scraps of clay lettered with fragments of Sappho’s poems in the original ancient Greek and in translation, set onto a pair of Victorian double doors with original fittings.

The old double doors give form to the ideas of obscurity and clarity embodied in the scraps of text, a sense of hidden things opening to revelation, but retaining their mystery.

Invocation in 72 Fragments is not for sale.

This is a detail from Invoking blue made on a single Victorian pine door, complete with blue glass handle. Here words describing blueness are lettered onto clay panels fitted to the door, the text running across from clay to painted wood, invoking a space made physical by the words. These large artworks stand on the ground, so don’t need to be hung, but only fixed to the wall. They work best in a fairly big space, articulating a blank wall, for example, or fixed as a screen or room divider, where the painted back is also visible.

Signed one-off. 198cm high x 69cm wide. For sale £450

This is a detail from Into Day, setting text by Muriel Rukeyser:

I want strong peace, and delight

the wild good.

I want to make my touch poems:

to find my morning, to find you entire

alive moving

The reclaimed old door is a quite literal representation of the sense of entering the place within. The lettering flows from wood to clay, the different textures giving different sensory impressions, making the words themselves inviting to touch, and the colours are glowing warm ochres and golden light.

Into Day is not for sale.

Invocation to night is made with a reclaimed narrow single door, with a beautiful inscription from Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion:

Now welcome night, thou night so long expected

Spread thy broad wing over my love and me

That no man may us see

And in thy sable mantle us enwrap

Signed one-off. 185cm high x 50cm wide. £500.

To buy or enquire about any work, please leave me a note in the comments box below, or click on contact details.

All photos copyright Liz Mathews.

Permission is needed for any use of these images.