Create to Inspire 2018
Create to Inspire is a collaborative project between Tony J Moody and the brick and tile makers HG Matthews.
HG Matthews is one of those rare artisan manufacturing survivors from a bygone age. Making and firing their hand-made bricks and tiles, true to a time honoured heritage with traditional ways. They purposefully buck the trend towards mass manufacture.
“Glaze bricks and bespoke tiles figure high amongst their quality products. Seeing these, and the variety and skilled nature of the work on a regular basis, I became increasingly interested in exploring what creative possibilities might open up to showcase these relatively common materials by combining them in fresh and interesting new ways."
For Tony, Create to Inspire represents a new creative departure and a coming together of a multi-layering of ideas, some traditional and others more innovative and subtle.
This ceramic collage was commissioned for the client reception area within the glaze department of
H G Matthews at the brickworks in Bellingdon, Bucks. The wall measures 3.3 metres by 2.8 metres.
For the established painter and ceramic artist Tony J Moody, who began his career in the early 1990’s, the artwork Create to Inspire measuring 2.8 by 3.3 metres, is his largest to date. It distills and merges ideas from both his painting and ceramics background.
Asked to comment about the ideas and some of the imagery included within the piece his thoughts were as follows:
”For H G Matthews, a third generation family run, traditional brick and tile makers, it was important for me to do something new and very site specific. Given creative freedom the intention was to make a piece overwhelming influenced and rooted in a sense of place; about Buckinghamshire, a tapestry of ideas, weaving separate threads into a playful new union. Ideas that draws inspiration from the land and earth, and from the materials made from it, bricks and tiles, imbued with history and importantly a powerful sense of nature. Aware of the traditional Buckinghamshire vernacular building style featuring brick and the abundantly available flint, I started wondering what would happen if this look was slightly subverted and I used broken brick shards like flint. We live in an age where our impact on the land, in terms of waste is under ever closer scrutiny, so why not take what may otherwise be essentially a waste product and use it creatively. In my mind these two ideas creatively fused together to form part of a fresh and appropriate visual language.”