MOSAICS: Finding beauty in a broken world
My current passion for art is mosaics. Here is how this new art medium came to be. During the Oct 2017 N Ca Tubbs Fire that devastated large swaths of Sonoma County my home and art studio along with many oil paintings and renderings were destroyed. After the smoke cleared- the rubble and ashes revealed loads of ceramic shards that managed to survive. From these bittersweet pieces came my recent mosaic. Individual functional art pieces, and also- with neighbors in shared community art making!
This creative art process of “finding beauty in a broken world” is a quote from Terry Tempest Williams book of the same name. She goes on to say; “a mosaic is a conversation between what is broken; finding the harmony is only achievable by the breaking apart and then rediscovery of the mosaic fragments unified as a whole”.
The mosaic art I have been creating this past year contain precious ceramic shards like my grandmother’s Royal Dalton China, the little Celtic Green Man that hung for years on an apple tree in the orchard, my wedding ceremony Navajo drinking vessel.
A current public art endeavor is covering a stone bench that survived the wild fires with donated tile pieces – placed in the neighborhood as a colorful spot of beauty and rest – in memoriam to our neighbors who lost their lives in the firestorm.
