Margaret Almon Mosaics

Welcome to Margaret Almon Mosaics

WELCOME!  Mosaics have a magic in their nature, in the way many pieces come together to make a whole that is energetic, catching the light with many facets.  It's not putting a puzzle together, but building a home for joy to live, like the nautilus with it's many chambers. 

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Upcoming Shows  Experience of mosaics in person, where you can touch them, and see how they change with every angle.  You can find my work at shows and shops in the greater Philadelphia area.  Or shop online at my Nutmeg Designs Etsy, which also features the original abstract stained glass designs of my husband, and the other partner in Nutmeg Designs, Wayne Stratz.

Mosaic Patchwork Pendants Making Their Debut at OJR Show this Weekend

Several people have requested I make mosaic jewelry, and I finally took the plunge!  I will be bringing these, among others, to the Owen J. Roberts show this weekend, March 6-7, 2010.  The center pendant is composed of colored gold smalti in a Log Cabin quilt block.  The yellow ochre and blue green pendants are a mixture of gold smalti, glass and ceramic tile, and millefiori.  At first I was a bit intimidated by such a small surface area(1 inch square), but it turned out to be a fun challenge, and I'm excited to make wearable work!

Terry Tempest Williams: A Mosaic is a Conversation between what is Broken

When I found out that Terry Tempest Williams had written a book on mosaic, I anticipated the loveliness of a fluid writer approaching one of my favorite subjects, but I was still awed by how wonderfully she captures mosaic as an art form, and as a way to find beauty in a broken world.  She begins with a quote, "The very language of tesserae tells us that this harmony is only achievable through the breaking and then rediscovery of the mosaic fragments" Natascia Festa, Nittola.  Then she wrote a kind of poetry:

A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken.

A mosaic is a conversation that takes place on surfaces.

A mosaic is a conversation with light, with color, with form.

A mosaic is a conversation with time.

Tempest Williams immerses herself in mosaic, using her eyes and hands to fully experience the process, which then she expresses in her insightful words.  I wrote poetry for many years, and to hear Williams bridging the distance between my love of words and my love of mosaic, is like a homecoming.  She describes a conversation with one of her teachers, Marco De Luca:

De Luca explains the method.  Our eyes are convex, not flat, so curved surfaces like the niche in a church provide a "place to rest our eyes."  He pauses, "I call this an embrace.  In mosaics, it is in the curve that light is reflected--for me, this translates into a spiritual space."

See an object is really about listening.  He cradles his hands close to his mouth to explain.  Art, by its nature, is expressive and creates this emotional reaction in the public.  When my eyes are turned outward and inward at the same time, this is where I find my depth.(emphasis mine)

The public is used to figurative mosaics, representational mosaics, mosaics as paintings.  He shakes his head.  "I wanted to find the essential features of mosaic.  I wanted to express my language of desire, making use of tesserae to express my emotions."

I am interested in now in what my eyes can see, what my fingers can touch, what my hand can know by moving slowly across flesh, or fur, or feathers, or stone.  I trust what I see.  The surface of things is what we see.  I trust what I touch.  The surface of things is what we touch.

After learning about mosaics in Italy with teachers such as Luciana Notturni,Tempest Williams goes on to experience the mosaic transformations of Lily Yeh and the villagers in Rwanda she worked with to build a memorial at a mass grave in 2003. Lily Yeh started to work with the power of public art in 1986 Philadelphia!  She brought together residents of  neighborhoods in North Philadelphia to transform vacant lots and abandoned buildings with mosaic and painting, often transforming the lives of the residents as well, with the Village of the Arts and Humanities.

Beauty...comes to us with no work of our own; then leaves us prepared to undergo great labor. 

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just.  

Tempest Williams includes the above quotation from Scarry, and encourages us to take courage in beauty, to turn inward and outward at the same time.

Simon Rodia and Watts Towers: An Urgent Need for Expression

Stratoz and I recently discovered Retro TV which we can magically receive due to a cheap digital converter box and rabbit ears from Radio Shack(yes, we are very high tech!)  Dragnet was unknown to me as a child, but is a regular on Retro TV and yesterday I was watching the odd intro where Joe Friday advertises some attraction of Los Angeles in his deadpan voice, and the attraction turned out to be Watts Towers.  Mosaics on Dragnet!  With Friday's emphasis that the Towers survived the Watts Riots of 1965.

I'd heard of the Watts Towers but did not realize how tall they are, with some approaching 99 feet, and that Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant, created them by himself with only a few hand tools, over a period of 30 years, starting in the 1920's.  He collected broken bottles and china and anything else he could find to mosaic the structures composed of metal pipe. 

I can't imagine what it was like to live in Watts with this tower slowly growing toward the sky and then literally towering over the neighborhood.  It's like living in the shadow of a mountain, part of the landscape but wondrously bizarre. 

I found a video of a 1957 documentary called The Towers, by William Hale,  which is a fascinating look at Rodia at work.  The narrator cites Rodia's "urgent need for expression," which captures the intense drive he had to build something big.  It reminds of Philadelphia's Isaiah Zagar and his Magic Gardens, how someone collects castoffs, scraps, all that is unwanted, and turns it into expression, into art, or in some cases, orders for demolition, followed by rescue and a flow of people wanting to come and see.

 

Related Posts:
In a Dream

The Magic Garden of Philadelphia:  Mosaic Immersion with Isaiah Zagar

Calliope Recycled Glass Tile: Delightful Variegation for Mosaics

I am always looking for new tesserae to create mosaics with, and when I saw the Calliope Series of  Recycled Glass Tile at Opus Mosaics, I was hooked!  The variegation is especially enticing, allowing for visual texture, and giving a lively feeling, in motion with swirls.  The sheen is lightly iridized.  According to Hakatai, the Oregon Importer of these tiles, they are 50% recycled glass, 90% of which is post-consumer.  As soon as they arrived, I was in the studio experimenting.  This trivet on the right has a border of Calliope tiles in dark and light groups, plus some solid glass tile and a center of Vitrium tile(made in Point Pleasant, PA!)

I also have a sheet of Garden, in shades of blue and green.

Heart in the Right Place: Etsy Project Embrace

Valentine's Day reminded me of Etsy Project Embrace and this heart I made of glass tile and gold smalti on Pennsylvania Slate.  This listing on Etsy is in honor of my sister-in-law, Gail, survivor of ovarian cancer, and my friend Lynn of UnaOdd. 

I will donate 50% of the proceeds of the sale of this Swirly Heart Mosaic to the American Cancer Society as part of Etsy Project Embrace. Fellow etsian, lauraslocumpainted.etsy.com / creativelytangled.etsy.com  was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.   Etsy Project Embrace is aiming to raise money for cancer research and promote awareness in support of Laura.

Purchase this Valentine, and put your(and my) heart in the right place!

Hammer and Hardie here I come! My Log came.

I've had the mosaic cutting tool set of hammer and hardie for longer than I want to admit, waiting until I found a log to use as a base.  Finally, I found Ted Frumkin's woodworking studio in Western PA, and he was able to take a piece of Catalpa just the right size and clean it up for me and ship it across the state, just in time for a monster snow storm!

Stratoz came charging up the stairs with a big box yesterday, and it was my log!  We didn't even get mail the day before that, so this was very exciting.  He heaved the log up onto my drawing table, and now we need to drill a hole and sink the hardie.  Then I will be set to use the traditional technique for cutting smalti, still favored in Italy.  

I learned to use this tool at a mosaic workshop at Snow Farm: The New England Craft Program.  You balance the piece of glass smalti on the finely honed edge of the hardie and tap it with the hammer and it shears into pieces.  Smalti can be a challenge to nip with wheeled mosaic nippers, so I'm looking forward to getting to know my new tool!

 

 

Getting Ready for the Owen J. Roberts Craft Show March 6-7 2010

 
I'm pleased to report that Stratoz and I will be at the Owen J. Roberts Friends of the Arts 30th Annual Craft Show, March 6-7, 2010, as Nutmeg Designs.  I've been in the studio since the holiday shows settled down, and I really liked how this picture frame turned out!  Antique gold VanGogh glass, with all its lovely textured swirls, with accents of Mother of Pearl tile and gold smalti in each corner.  I rescued this frame from a thrift store because of its neat little cut-outs at top and bottom.  Be sure to come to the OJR show to check it out. 

Art in the atoms: Chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

I had never heard of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, but came across mention of her in a radio show, Engines of our Ingenuity, narrated by John H. Lienhard on public radio.  Dorothy Crowfoot was born in 1910, in Egypt, and one summer before college, helped her parents excavate Byzantine churches with her ability to reconstruct mosaic floors from fragments. She considered archaeology in college, but chemistry and her fascination with crystals won out, though there is an intriguing reference to her spending a summer combining both by studying glass tesserae from the mosaics of Jerash, Jordan. 

Lienhard presents a compelling picture of Crowfoot, describing a day in 1934 when she, "found she had crippling rheumatoid arthritis. Down through a very active life she's worked in pain, with hands and feet terribly twisted.

Only hours after she found that out, people in her lab made the first X-ray photo of a protein crystal. And she realized she could go from a pointillist X-ray pattern -- a broken Byzantine mosaic -- to the 3-D structure of a complex organic molecule. That day, she said, began in pain and ended in a vision."

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin went on to win the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in x-ray crystallography, determining the structure of penicillin, insulin and B12.  The beautiful drawing below is of insulin, made by Hodgkin, and presented to Dr. Helen Megaw, crystallographer and organizer of the Festival Pattern Group in Britain, 1951.  Hodgkin refused to accept a fee for the drawing, or take copyright for a pattern perpetuated by nature.

Megaw loved pattern, and dedicated an exhibit as part of the Festival of Britain, to the wonders of scientific pattern, as applied to wallpaper, fabric, china and other domestic objects.  She gave Hodgkin a linen pillow embroidered with the crystal structure of aluminum hydroxide as a wedding gift. 

I love this idea of art as a way to express science.  The beauty of our world goes beneath the surface.

Glass Mosaic Basics Class in Reading, PA, April 10-11, 2010

I am pleased to announce I am teaching  Glass Mosaic Basics on Saturday April 10th and Sunday April 11th at the fabulous Goggleworks Center for the Arts in Reading, PA, through the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen.

On Saturday we will cover safety, cutting glass with wheeled mosaic nippers, and glue, glue, glue!  There will be an array of glass tesserae for you to use, as well as a variety of bases. 

There will be tools for you to use, but if you wish to invest in your own wheeled mosaic nippers, you can purchase online at Artful Crafter, or try places like Lowe's or Michael's.  I use both the red-handled nippers and the Leponitt's with the black handles.  The  latter can cut thinner pieces of glass, but I find the red ones more comfortable to hold.  Everyone is different in which they prefer.

Whatever you have chosen to make will dry overnight, and Sunday afternoon we will take the plunge and grout, so you can leave with a finished piece.   

This is a class to immerse you in the basics of putting together a glass mosaic, so that you can go on and try this at home at your own pace.  No previous art experience is required, just a desire to create, try something new, and have fun.

Sign up here for Glass Mosaic Basics

Housewarming Commission: Mosaic Candle Holder

A friend recently commissioned a candle holder as a housewarming gift.  She wanted sage green and earthtones, and it was a cool combination of colors to work with. 

Most important with a candle holder is the need for translucence to really let the light shine.  Weldbond can get trapped with no air when gluing glass to glass, and take months to turn from white to clear.  Once I used silicone, but it was an oozing gooey mess, and the odor was strong.

I realized I had a bottle of Mac Glue, which I had bought but hadn't tried yet.  Mac glue is thin, sort of like diluted hair conditioner, and has no vertical hold, but my base was square, I could do one side at a time laying flat. At first it didn't seem to have any adhesive qualities at all!  But after 1/2 hour or so it began to get tacky.  It dried clear by the next day and didn't ooze into the grout lines.   

I used a combination of vitreous glass tiles swirled with coppery aventurine, which had an opalescent glow, and transparent stained glass for a more intense light.  Because the  bottom edge didn't need to be translucent, I used VanGogh glass, which is clear glass painted on the back, and has a swirly texture.  

My friend said the recipients loved it, and I am honored to have my work as part of their new home.  May it bring them much light and joy!