I create art to give tangible shape and form to the unknowable, creating a map to places I’ll never find again. There isn’t a destination: the process is the objective. The mosaic serves as a souvenir of a journey through obscure lands. Creating mosaic is my way of making sense of a complex and uncertain world. As the work becomes more map-like, I seem to be finding my way without knowing where I am going. I remain fascinated with an altered view of the earth on which we live, landscapes both familiar and unreal. Hopefully, after seeing my work, viewers will look at the environment around them with different eyes. At the moment, the illusion and the contradiction fascinate me. Is this a slide under a microscope or a view from outer space?
For me, mosaic is all about essential structures and skeletal elements, perplexing thoughts and intricate concepts. I work in natural materials (marble, glass, smalti, minerals, golds, recycled materials, shells, found objects and more) using the tesserae, andamento and interstices to create landscapes that are familiar and unreal, positive and negative, complex and serene. As much happens in the ‘spaces between’, as does with the actual tesserae we notice first. Just as so much of life is in the gaps. It’s a little like trying to hear the silence between musical notes, straining to catch what we have no evidence exists. Perhaps these interstices offer a clue to what lies below the surface, things we sense but don’t know for sure.
Putting together the tangible and intangible, bits of color and texture, tesserae of meaning, I assemble each work one piece at a time, building a world to get lost or even found in. The work is difficult: a struggle to get every piece right while managing its relationship to the next piece and the one before, all the time considering the work as a whole. Creating with a broad range of materials raises the complexity beyond just cutting a piece to fit. Unlimited choices in scale and texture and reflectivity and spacing and more, keep my mind working on many different levels at the same time. It is engrossing and consuming and challenging and hard and I wouldn’t do anything else.