The finished stone now in the floor of the south transept of Westminster Abbey © Stephen Raw

The stone’s ‘champion’ has been Sir John Tooley (past director of The Royal Opera House) who sought a fitting memorial to the founders in the Abbey for some years. He worked closely with Stephen and successfully saw the design through the many and various committees. Stephen’s design, cut in Cumbrian slate by one of Britain’s leading letter cutters, Annet Stirling of Incisive Letterwork, also has the added attraction of having the four names in gold. This is the first such use of gilding in an Abbey floor memorial.

The expectation is that many from the world of ballet, including people who just simply love the art of dancing, will go to the Abbey to pay their respects at the nation’s heart for such memorials.

Photos from the Abbey service can be seen on The Ballet Association site:

http://www.balletassociation.co.uk/Pages/company.html

Dame Monica Mason, director of The Royal Ballet said: “It is a fitting honour that the founders of The Royal Ballet are recognised. Dame Ninette de Valois worked tirelessly to establish her companies and school. With Frederick Ashton, Constant Lambert and Margot Fonteyn, she brought ballet to a huge new audience. Through their immense contribution, ballet in Britain is now a thriving art form and The Royal Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet School are known throughout the world.”

Annet Stirling, Stephen Raw and Sir John Tooley inspect the stone before it was laid in Westminster Abbey

The stone is situated very near Handel's memorial

A detail of the gold lettering

Detail of the lettering

http://www.tolkienmaps.com/threetolkienmaps.html

The unveiling party – scissors at the ready!

Nearly down!

Jan Sutch Pickard, who organised the Ross of Mull workshop, points to her 'g'

Hear Brian Cox reading the poem at   http://www.bbc.co.uk/robertburns/works/a_mans_a_man_for_a_that/

The ‘BurnsBanner’ Project Manager for the SPL was Jonathan Meuli who can be emailed on: jm101@talktalk.net

STEPHEN RAW (born London 1952) has lived in Manchester for the last thirty years. He has been a self-employed artist and designer since he returned to Britain from two years teaching at the National Arts School in Papua New Guinea, during which time he worked closely with Archie Brennan.

Stephen’s work is varied, from paintings in exhibitions through to cover designs for Carcanet Press and his commercial lettering for a variety of clients, including leading publishers, architects and design groups throughout Europe. ‘Fundamental to all my artwork’ Stephen says, ‘is a love of language and how that language is given a visual dimension through signs we simply call letters: never-failing sources of inspiration. Letters are images in themselves and, for me, that’s more than enough to be getting on with.’ Recent commissions have been for a design for a stone commemorating the founders of the Royal Ballet and working on collaborations with the poet Carol Ann Duffy.

Stephen has exhibited his own work widely: Germany, Ireland the United States and Italy. One of his paintings, words by Nelson Mandela, is in the renowned  collection of the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin. All his book jacket/cover artwork, part of the Carcanet Press archive, is now kept by the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester.

Currently he sits on The Royal Mint Design Advisory Committee, chaired by Sir Christopher Frayling.

‘Sweet Sister Death Has Gone Debauched Today’ (see ‘Catalogue elsewhere on the website) was exhibited at Parson’s School of Design, New York, in 2001 as part of a Glasgow School of Art travelling exhibition. Stephen was a visiting lecturer in Glasgow for 15 years and, until recently, was a part-time tutor on the MA Design Course, Manchester Metropolitan University. He occasionally lectures there still.

He is a frequent visitor to the Isles of Mull and Iona where  the people and landscape have inspired many pieces including ‘Kilvickeon’ and ‘Isle of Mull Diary’. Perhaps this in part due to the fact that a branch of his family came from an unspecified part on the west coast of Scotland.

Over the weekend of 28th March 2009 the Peace  Banner was unveiled in the centre of Podujevë. At the top is a photo of the finished artwork; below, the unveiling ceremony showing the wall Matt and Stephen attached it to. On the right is a photo of Mandi, Stephen and Matt – Mandi’s help was invaluable as his relatives kindly supplied MaK with scaffolding for the two days it took to put it all up. He was also our translator for the project.

In October 2008 Stephen had gone with Manchester Aid to Kosova to run workshops where participants were invited to paint words for ‘Peace’. Using any language and any script the results were ‘photoshoped’ into an 11 meter wide banner which went on display in the centre of Podujevë to commemorate the dedication of the 22-acre ‘Manchester Peace Park’ in Kosova. The Peace Park was requested in 1999 by children medically evacuated to Manchester who survived the massacre of their family on 28 March 1999 — this was the 10th anniversary of the tragedy.

Stephen ran painting workshops with a Women’s Group, local schools (see below), the local Mosque and in Podujevë Town Hall. Back in the UK people from Manchester and the Eden Project in Cornwall made their contributions which were included in the final banner artwork. This project is part of the work of pARTicipate, a collaboration between Stephen and Matthew Raw (http://www.matthewraw.co.uk/index.php?page=participate).

If you would still like to contribute to MaK please go to www.makonline.org where your money can be ‘gift aided’. Thank you.

The Gliché Prints each measure 329 x 483mm and are printed on Bockingford watercolour paper. They are despatched in a sturdy card tube for no extra cost to any address in the UK. (Overseas buyers please email.) They cost £60 each which includes VAT.

Annunciation

Each Child's Name

Christmas Flowers

Call It Nazareth

Mirabile Dictu

Stephen Raw: Hour, 2009, cast bronze, 90mm. Cast by Niagara Falls Castings. Limited edition - available only from BAMS website.

This is the first medal that Stephen Raw has produced for the British Art Medal Society, BAMS ( http://www.bams.org.uk/medal-detail.php?medal=198 ).

It is the fruit of one of his collaborations with the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. In the past Raw has created artwork inspired by Duffy’s critically acclaimed collection Rapture. When the book was launched on London’s Southbank, Raw had an exhibition and produced an animated version of some of her poems. The collection went on to win the prestigious T.S. Eliot prize, and it is one of those poems, ‘Hour’, that this medal memorialises.

(The full poem is reproduced below by kind permission of the publishers, Picador.) ‘Poetry is so often rewarding’, says Raw, ‘when working with language that someone has taken time, care and consideration in creating’.

It is ‘language-made-visible’ that is at the core of all of Raw’s work. In this medal, as with his other pieces, there is a celebration of the imagery of letters. His personal approach to text eschews mechanical typographic forms and allows a freedom to celebrate those arbitrary shapes called ‘letters’. As the previous poet laureate Andrew Motion observed when he opened Raw’s exhibition Memory Language, ‘Stephen practises an art which is as old as the hills, and yet makes it seem brand new … It slows down language so that we can dwell on it and in it, but also accelerates its passage into our heads and imaginations.’

Recently Raw worked again with Carol Ann Duffy on her lyrics for a new work: The Manchester Carols (see two examples below). Currently he is working on a commission from the Royal Opera House to design a stone celebrating the four founders of the Royal Ballet. He is also well-known as the cartographer who redrew The Lord of the Rings maps, for which he worked closely with Christopher Tolkien. Raw’s maps were commissioned by HarperCollins and have been used in all copies of the book since 1993; he continues to sell a limited edition of them by permission of the J.R.R. Tolkien Estate. A set has recently been purchased by The British Library. His work has been exhibited widely, in Germany, the USA, Italy, Ireland, Pakistan and throughout the UK. Currently he sits on The Royal Mint Design Advisory Committee. Raw moved to Manchester from London in 1973 for an MA at Manchester Metropolitan University and has lived there since, save for two years lecturing at the National Arts School in Papua New Guinea.

HOUR

Love’s time’s beggar, but even a single hour,

bright as a dropped coin, makes love rich.

We find an hour together, spend it not on flowers

or wine, but the whole of the summer sky and a grass ditch.

For thousands of seconds we kiss; your hair

like treasure on the ground; the Midas light

turning your limbs to gold. Time slows, for here

we are millionaires, backhanding the night

so nothing dark will end our shining hour,

no jewel hold a candle to the cuckoo spit

hung from the blade of grass at your ear,

no chandelier or spotlight see you better lit

than here. Now. Times hates love, wants love poor,

but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw.