Lettering artist Martin Wenham breathes new life into found wood

Letter carver Martin Wenham creates erudite sculptures that combine poetry and craft. Ahead of a book launch and an exhibition at Goldmark Gallery in Rutland, he told Crafts about his love of language and the surprising virtues of driftwood.

Where do you source your wood from?

I often find interesting driftwood on a beach near our home in north-west Wales. I love plywood that’s been in the sea – you get amazing surface textures. Recently, I enjoyed using wood from an old boat that was still full of nails.

Otherwise, I like wood from fruit trees – plum, cherry, pear, apple – as you get such lovely crisp letters. People often give me pieces they’ve cut down or found themselves. The nice thing about working with scrap wood is that it has a history already. All I’m doing is adding another chapter.

What work are you showing in your Goldmark exhibition, Look, That You May Hear Me?

I’m showing 50-odd pieces that I’ve made in the last three years – there’s a lot to see, including pieces that I’ve painted as well as plenty that rely on the wood’s colouring alone.

I’ve been making since 1967, when I studied with the carver Harry Spring. Today, I still do what he taught me all those decades ago.

How do you find the quotations you use?

I choose what jumps off the page at me – it could be anything, but it must be short, as carving takes a long time. Looking around my room, there’s a piece quoting The Battle of Maldon [a 10th-century poem written in Old English], a Picasso quote: ‘Art is a lie that tells the truth’, and one quoting from the Song of Songs.

I find my quotes everywhere, from the Bible to Groucho Marx. I consider myself an artist, and my subject is language.

What inspired you to write The Art of Letter Carving in Wood?

This book is my legacy. I’ve put pretty much everything I know in there. Previous books on the subject have focused solely on technique, but mine also explores design. It’s an attempt to pass the baton to encourage others to take up carving letters in wood.

Please can you tell us a little about your working process?

A piece of wood may need resurfacing, or I might want to preserve its surface as part of its history. I then do the engineering first: making a base if it’s freestanding, and so on. By this time, I will have decided what message I'm going to ask the piece of wood to carry. I spend a long time designing each piece full-size on paper. I then look at it for several days, tweaking it until it’s as good as I can get it, before transferring the design to the wood with typewriter carbon.

I then start carving, beginning with the first word’s first letter; I dislike things out of sequence. Then there's a question of paint and colour. Sometimes I paint the wood before I put the lettering on, carving through the paint into the wood, or I might put a finish on the wood with no paint at all.

Much has changed since you began making in the 1960s. What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the world of letter-carving during that time?

In the sixties, lettering was simply seen as a craft. You carved words in a straight line for tombstones, street signs and that sort of thing. The idea that has grown up in my working lifetime is that lettering – when designed in the right way – can reinforce and interpret the meaning of language. So we've gone from left-to-right lettering to convey information, to lettering as decoration, as art.

To me, it’s rather like synaesthesia: letter forms designed into words almost have flavour, they almost have taste. The right words have to go in the right way on the right piece of wood. This may sound very fanciful, but at the end of the book, I say to the reader: ‘Listen to the wood. Listen with your hands, listen with your eyes, and the wood will tell you what it can say.’ I really do believe that.

Visit Look, That You May Hear Me at Goldmark Gallery from 19 March to 19 April. The Art of Letter Carving in Wood is out now from Crowood Press