Love it, or hate it. A common saying associated with the black and yellow portly jar. Its crude oil settled, dragged over a slice for breakfast. An acquired taste to be experienced and appreciated, although unashamedly, not by all. Marmite.

Plain (ish, depending on your interpretation). A sliced vehicle, capable of accepting various toppings. Eaten, at any time. Not just for the planned morning sustenance around the early breakfast table, 7.45 am, but equally to fill the inconvenient void within the stomach of a busy life. Toast in one hand, the other on the steering wheel. Immediately transferred to the mouth, clamped between teeth, allowing the left hand to make gear changes that move the Hyundai from the drive, to the road. Already swallowed. That’s the toast. A pliable substrate, functional and portable. Almost any place, any time, and covered in Marmite.

Complimentary ingredients. Some kind of balance comes into being. A positive strum to our sense of taste.

Here I want to make a blunt and immediate link to our visual senses. In looking and seeing we absorb experience. Sometimes, these feel better savoured when balanced, one thing speaking excitedly with another. Not over one another. A conversational dance we enjoy when creating our Modern Marquetry blocks. The raw ingredient from which a pattern is sliced.

And so unfolds the consideration of timbers, end grain or cross grain, deep red, dark brown. Reformed plastics and CD’s, birch or shuttering ply, depth and angle of cut, arrangement, spacing and density. Key factors to consider when making our patterns. Glue up, fix down, resurface. Repeat, and by doing so incrementally deposit strata.

Eventually, after this repeated process, the filer block rests alongside other versions on a bench in Nancegollan. A potent pattern presents along its long edges, later to be sliced, introduced to a worktop, room divider, feature wall or even flooring. Applied to the surface with consideration, choreographing not a riot, but a dance of character. Something that feels right, much more than pleasant, equally less than overwhelming.  Marmite on toast.