The Artificer (also "Articacter, Artifaucer") of Graves was a architect and builder of religious automata of the High Uzdumalian period. Little reliable information remains about her or his life, including her birth-name, and given the broad range of works credited to Graves by her contemporaries, it is possible that "Artificer of Graves" was a use-name given to a collective workshop. The use-name most plausibly indicates Graves' role as a cenotaphic artist.

Graves was most likely formally trained as an architect; Pellet's Visitations claims the mercury pool built for Widower's Palace is her design, originally submitted as a masterwork to the Imperial Academy. However, her efforts as an architect seem to have largely been writ large: monuments, gardens, and companions to colossi. Surviving examples and records demonstrate a sense of space informed by the High Uzdumalian principles of "gravity" and "focus", showing a careful attention to sight-lines designed to induce a contemplative reflection on the nature of permanence.  Photographs of her works frequently show religious motifs such as panthers or starfish rendered in gold and aluminum filigree, although most examples of her architectural decorations have long since been stolen and melted down. Indeed, few of Graves' architectural works lasted to our day; of these, only the Fortress (and neighboring Plaza) of the Drowned Sailor in Kázann and the Memorial Arch within the capital itself have survived without extensive reconstruction.

Graves' automata have fared better; her surviving attested works include Baron Világítótorony's phototrope, the Coppery Hound, and the well-known Candlephagic Mourner. Her most famous work, the Hundredfold Sybil, was demolished within twenty years of the death of St. Pertempuran. Graves' exquisite skill as an artificer is perhaps best demonstrated by the superstitious dread in which the Sybil and their prophecies were held; the distinct lack of documentary evidence of the Sybil (only still photographs and a precious few sound recordings of their oracular proclamations remain, and their are no remaining diagrams of their electrical or mechanical workings) attests to a concerted effort on the part of Court and Temple to destroy all documentary evidence of their testimony and prevent their reconstruction. (The Banns Hammer, used during the induction ceremony of judges newly initiated into the Coenobite Sisterhood during their nominal marriage to Truth and the State, is stated by its current owners to have been the work of Graves. While the delicacy of the ajoure is commensurate with known examples of Graves' work, the use of male figures within the decoration is unknown elsewhere within her corpus and would have demonstrated an implausible heterodoxy in a Court-supported artist such as Graves. The Hammer may have been created by a eunuch or male student of Graves.)

The name of Graves is attested by several sources, including contemporary art critics, purchasing documents, and published sermons on temple extravagances. Claims that the "artifaucer of Gravs" mentioned in surviving transcripts of court discussion of the well-known cenotaph for the Dowager Duchess Hideg (badly damaged during the Scientists' Revolt and rebuilt with a highly anachronistic airiness of design and materials) to refers to a resident or residents of the city of Grabz must at this point be judged spurious; while records show Grabz, then a moderately-sized city conquered less than twenty years previously, had several foundries and a tide-driven power supply considered a scientific marvel even of that time, it was neither an artistic nor a technological center, and it is exceedingly unlikely that politically sensitive works would have been given to one not born within the Empire.

Citations:

Hundredfold Sybil