Maia Gaffney-Hyde

My Lettering Arts Trust Apprenticeship started on the 10th January 2023, with master carver Charlotte Howarth in West Acre, Norfolk. My apprenticeship will last 2 years, the first 9 months on a part-time basis. I am the 10th LCAT apprentice. 

Lettering Arts Trust Apprentice 2023-24




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Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5

12. Nereids


In 2021 the Lettering Arts Trust developed a touring exhibition entitled The Nereids, showcasing carved and mixed media works by lettering artists associated with the charity. The Nereids, attendants of Poseidon, were revered by the citizens of Ancient Greece as the benign goddesses of the sea’s rich bounty. Each Nereid represents a personification of a particular attribute of the sea.

I choose Eione, the Nereid of the ‘beach strand’/‘sea shore’, after doing some research and thinking about ways to incorporate more text into the design, I found a poem by Sappho that would work well with the subject of this Nereid. The poem being fragment 92 from Mary Barnard’s translation of Sappho, published by the University of California Press. Sappho lived in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. in the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, ancient Greece. In her time poetry would have been sung or recited with an accompanying lyre, and not necessarily written down. The poem you read here has been told and retold, written and rewritten; in fact the earliest papyrus texts date from about three hundred years after Sappho’s death.

The poem itself:

Do you remember

How a golden
broom grows on
the sea beaches

The pieces for the exhibition are all 300 x 300mm, so I began working out the design on thumbnails for that shape. Figs. 1-5 show the developement from the first sketch to the final drawing. As this is a piece of poetry and in this instance the gap between the first line and the rest of the poem is of significance, acting partly as a title, but also as a reminder of how these poems survive as fragments. I therefore also kept the left aligned text, although this is a slightly less common alignment of text for memorial work, more commonly text is centred or made to fit within a stone.

For this text I wanted to use lowercase letterforms again, but with a serif, as my other lowercase piece was sans serif. Although I’ve chosen not to use a full serif, but something closer to half serifs. As you can see from Fig. 1, I started with a very loose sketch of the letters. By drawing out the longest line first I determined the proportions of letters, wide enough to fill the stone, but also leaving a good amount of space between and above the lines. 

The letter forms are a little narrower than full width, to help fit them on the piece. I was keen to have the sinuous shapes that come with a rounder letter form, rather then something slightly squarer, to the extent of added curving junctions on the ‘y’ and ‘w’, Figs 6-8.  

Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8
Figs. 7+8 show a ‘w’ with an extra curving junction, that we didn’t go with as it brought too much space in the word. The letterforms have a slight caligrphic influence, the ‘half serif’ emphasing this with a slight swelling at the top right/bottom left of the upright strokes, this also adds to the sense of flow in the letters.

Fig. 9 Fig. 10 Fig. 11 Fig. 12 Fig. 13
I was keen to use a light coloured stone, something that would evoke sand, without being overtly sandy, and moleanos seemed a good choice. For the surface of the stone I wanted to carve a ripple effect mimicking how the sea pushes and shapes the sand on a beach, often when the tide has gone out and left the current lines. The finished effect should be quite subtle, in some lights almost imperceptible, however actually carving this required getting the peaks and troughs of the ‘ripples’ just right. Carving letters into a textured or uneven surface is a possibility with memorial work and can have a really nice effect. This piece was a good way to give this a go.

Figs. 9-13. I made a practice piece to be sure that I got the right effect, this ended up being a really useful exercise. Charlotte suggested thinking about the shape of the ripples as a waveform itself, this particularly helped when it came to carving. I used a medium sized bullnose chisel to carve out the shapes, and once satisfied with the shadows I went over the whole piece with a small bullnose chisel, smoothing out the cut makes and creating a uniform texture. Unifying the surface made it much easier to draw on and carve the letters. For the practice piece I just cut the name ‘EIONE’, in a capital version of the letterform I was working on as lowercase. Matching the left hand alignment and experimenting with a colour for painting the stone.

I was pleased to see that in harsh direct light the carving of the ripples is almost unnoticeable, but even in day light or a directional light there are varying degrees of definition. I didn’t want the carving to detract from the letters, Figs. 12+13 show this contrast in effect.

Fig. 14 Fig. 15 Fig. 16
Another aspect of the pieces I have worked on recently has been to prepare a mockup sketch of the finished piece, to present to a client. This is a really important part of the working process, Figs. 14-16 show the image I was working from, my own sketch and combining my sketch for the background texture underneath my drawn letters. Fig. 16 gives a sense of how the piece might look. Getting from my physical drawing to this digital version required scanning the drawing and editing the letters by tidying the edges and keeping the inside of the letters white, in other cases I might colour in the letters to give them more presence. I used Photoshop to prepare the images and Illustrator to put them together and adjust the transparencies to get the desired effect for the background.

Fig. 17 Fig. 18 Fig. 19 Fig. 20 Fig. 21 Fig. 22
Having already carved the background I started again on the actual piece and the process was much more straightforward. Figs. 17-22 show the development of the background.

Fig. 23 Fig. 24 Fig. 25
Throughout my apprenticeship I have drawn the letters directly onto the stone rather than use carbon paper, this piece is an example when drawing directly is favourable, as the surface is undulating and left with an uneven finish. That being said it is still time consuming to do, and challenging to get a precise line, although I feel I have improved by the end of this piece, using a Faber-Castell ‘Perfection Eraser Pencil’ really helped clean up the lines. Figs. 23-25 show the finished drawing.

Fig. 26 Fig. 27 Fig. 28 Fig. 29 Fig. 30 Fig. 31 Fig. 32
As with all the carving I have done on the apprenticeship Charlotte advises to create a deep cut, so that the letters have a ‘punched in’ look, by cutting to a depth where the shadow created by the letter has a ‘presence’ on the stone. Figs. 26-29 show the development of the carving after roughing out the letters. Fig. 30 shows the finished carving to the desired depth, there should be subtle but definite difference in how the letters sit on the stone between Fig. 29 and 30. Again in Fig. 31, where the top line has only been roughed out, but the lower lines have been cut deeper. The ‘u’ of the top line is less clear than the ‘a’ of the one below. I was satisfied with the depth and ‘presence’ of the letters that can be seen in the closeup in Fig. 32.


Fig. 33 Fig. 34 Fig. 35
Although I was happy with how I’d cut the letters, due to the light colour of this stone and its intended location, inside a gallery space, we felt it was best to paint the letters. I had in mind a colour that would tonally be suggestive of the shadow the stone naturally casts, but something that was warmer than a more typical grey. The subtle pinkish hue I opted for might have the suggestion of the colours thrown out at a sunrise or sunset reflecting on a beach. Fig. 33, this colour gives just enough definition to make the letters legible Fig. 34 shows me painting in Charlottes studio in West Acre. Fig. 35 shows the finished piece.

The exhibition continues at West Downs Gallery at the University of Winchester and will continue travelling for the rest of the year.

References
Sappho, trans. Mary Barnard, University of California Press, 2012.

13. Long form text coming soon...
My Lettering Arts Trust Apprenticeship started on the 10th January 2023, with master carver Charlotte Howarth in West Norfolk. My apprenticeship will last two years, the first year on a part-time basis. I am the 10th LCAT apprentice.






© Maia Gaffney-Hyde MMXXIII
© Maia Gaffney-Hyde MMXXIV