LOVE TOKENS
Gold, glass, and the alchemy of making the ordinary precious
Images : Dewi Tannatt Lloyd
Pieces will be available soon. Rachel Phillips Glass-Shop — Rachel Phillips Glass
Family Tree
This tree grew in the garden of my childhood home. It still does — but more vividly now in memory than in fact.
I am in a season of accompanying my parents through their final years, and the past has become more present than the present itself. Love and grief have learned to occupy the same space. They do not take turns.
My mother's memories are slipping away even as mine grow more luminous, more fixed. This piece lives in that exchange — what is lost on one side, held on the other.
Love Spoons/Lly garu
The Welsh custom of carving love spoons stretches back to the 17th century — young men shaping hearts, Celtic knotwork and bells from a single piece of wood as an act of devotion.
This piece is inspired by one of several historic examples in Brecon Museum, my own developing interest in Welsh traditions and folk customs for modern life and by a question: what does Wales' patron saint, St David's famous counsel mean for us today? Gwnewch y pethau bychain (do the little things) Quite a lot, I feel. The small acts of making, of brewing tea, of cooking — these are not ordinary. They are the gestures that sustain us. The real golden things.
Lovers Eyes
Love Tokens
Love Tokens is a series of small gilded and back-painted works celebrating the preciousness of what we give and receive in the rhythm of loving — others, and ourselves. That love may be romantic or platonic, fleeting or lifelong; these pieces honour all of it equally.
The works are inspired by Lover's Eyes — small, intimate portraits popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which a single eye was painted in miniature and exchanged between people as a keepsake. They are mesmerising and strange: part portrait, part jewel, resisting easy categorisation. In most cases both subject and artist remain unknown, which only deepens their mystery and their tenderness.
They belong to a moment before photography, when people were desperate not merely to give each other their image, but something that felt like a fragment of themselves — proof of presence, of feeling, of being truly seen. This feeling, for different reasons, continues today even while photography and the selfie has become ubiquitous.
These works carry that same impulse forward. Small enough to hold, precious enough to keep.
Love Letters
A series exploring the relationship between gold and preciousness — and what it means to make something truly precious for someone else.
Each letter is hand-painted in foliate form and gilded with 23 carat gold leaf, the richness of the material inseparable from the warmth of the intention behind it. They are made to celebrate those who matter to us: a new partner, a child, a name we hold dear.
A love letter is made to be given — and it is the recipient who will live with this one. Their initial, rendered in gold, becomes a mirror in the most literal sense: the gilded surface reflects their face back to them as they look at it. A letter that is theirs, an identity celebrated, and their own reflection held within it.