Liz Mathews, studio potter and lettering artist, works at Potters' Yard in North London with her partner Frances Bingham, writer. They set up their first pottery together in 1986, in West Hampstead.

Solo exhibitions include The Dunkirk Project, an online interactive installation 2010, Journey from Winter at London's Southbank Centre April to June 2008, including a series of gallery talks in the SBC's Literature and Spoken Word 2008 season, inner space in the.gallery@oxo in 2001, Continuous Cities at The Drill Hall, Rus in Urbe at Gabriel's Wharf. Group shows include Best of Hackney at The Geffrye Museum Design Centre and Pride and Prejudice at The Museum of London. Resident potter at Whitechapel Pottery from 1996-2006, her shows there included Timepieces and Winter Blues. At The Wisbech Pottery (1989-1996) shows included Baked Earth and True Fire, (at Wisbech & Fenland Museum in 1991), and A Midsummer Cushion, celebrating the bicentenary of John Clare in 1993.

Commissions include low-relief architectural portraits or lettered panels for The National Trust, London Hospital Trust, Octavia Hill Museum, Angles Theatre, and the Georgian Society, as well as numerous individual house portraits. Inscribed thrownware commissions include work for hospitals, churches, surgeries, theatres, museums and other public spaces, and countless private celebrations of civil partnerships, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and retirements. Her lettered wood panel Spacewater is the cover image for Journey from Winter: The Poetry of Valentine Ackland, Carcanet Press 2008. She contributed the images to a limited edition artists' book MOTHERTONGUE, with text by Frances Bingham, published in 1999, and they work together on many text/image joint projects.

Press coverage of Liz's work has appeared in The Guardian, The Times, Ceramic Review, Diva and The Pink Paper, Guardian Weekend, Time Out, Country Living and Studio Pottery, as well as on BBC radio and television.

If you like your ceramics tactile and graphic, you'll love Liz Mathews' latest collection.
(How to Buy Art for your Home - Guardian Designer Living)

Artist's statement: I want my work to reveal both the clay's original wet soft malleable state and the transforming action of the fire, and to contain an awareness of the earth/clay/body link: our relationship to the elements, the seasons, the action of time, the landscape. Text is important: I use lettering as an architectural framework for the design, both as a mapping device, and as an entry to the volume enclosed. The marks on the surface lead the eye to the inner space that the pot contains (not only in vessels but also to the implicit space contained within the planes of wall panels). Setting a 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. I liken this process to that of setting poetry to music, with the same implication of translation and reinterpretation.
I work in white stoneware (or terracotta), throwing on the wheel or handbuilding; with the clay I often use reclaimed or found materials. I decorate with underglaze oxides onto the raw dried clay with a brush, freehand. I sometimes use 9ct gold lustres, and some pots are glazed with a clear potash feldspar glaze fired to 1255° with green electricity.