Getting to Know You

How can a meaningful memorial be made without having a sense of the person it is supposed to represent?
This is our mantra at Elysium.

When a client contacts us, we treat every enquiry as a fresh project and as an individual.

Some prefer to communicate via email and be quite private about the project, which is fine. We ask the questions necessary to gather the information we need to start designing.
Others are keen for us to really develop a knowledge of the person we’re making a memorial to represent, and will chat on the phone or face to face, extensively about them. It is always a pleasure to hear people’s stories and humbling to be a part of honouring their lives.
Kate Semple is the founder of Elysium Memorials and would be the person a client would contact. She is very experienced in dealing with customers at all the different stages of bereavement. She says “I never lose sight of how important our memorials are to people and the responsibility we have to get them right. I see our job as helping to guide clients towards having something made that is imbued with an essence of the person it represents, while also being a beautiful artwork that stands the test of time.”

Producing anything so bespoke cannot be done through an on line form or a brochure. It has to be “person to person”. The questions we ask can enable us to pick up details and nuances; these can then be translated into becoming part of a sculpture or inscription. They are often subtle even abstracted details, that only the family have an understanding of, but incredibly powerful and meaningful to them.

The design process can take quite a time to get right. Drawings go backwards and forwards as Kate develops a sense of what will work for the client. She says “Thought, care and time are the three things required to make a meaningful and beautiful memorial. At Elysium we make art not about ourselves, but art for people about people, what could be more rewarding than that?”