Margaret Almon Mosaics

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.

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!

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.

In Honor of Martin Luther King Day: A Mosaic By Bufano

 

I was fascinated to discover this mosaic on Martin Luther King Day, of which I had never heard:

St. Francis of the Guns
Beniamino Bufano, 1898-1970
1969, bronze, gunmetal, mosaic tile

Commissioned by the mayor of San Francisco after the assasinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., made of voluntarily donated handgun metal from 2000 handguns, inlaid with mosaics of King, Kennedy, and Lincoln.

Watch Night 2009: Staying Awake

 This morning my mother sent me this great picture of my stepfather, Rev. Bill Hosking, wearing the mosaic cross I gave him for Christmas.  I am so pleased that he liked and looks to be enjoying it.  I found the cross at the "Mennonite Strip Mall" in Souderton, at the Care and Share Variety  Thrift Store.  Someone gave it away, and on the back was inscribed "Made in Bethlehem."  It's most likely Olive Wood, and I discovered that gifts made of Olive Wood from the Holy Land are very numerous.  The wood has acquired a sacred nature, with stories about only using the pruned branches from the oldest trees in Jersualem, in the City of Bethlehem.  I don't know why this cross ended up on sale, but I am glad I found it and was able to create a mosaic for Bill. 

My mother also told me that the church they co-pastor, Ephraim Moravian, had a last minute Watch Night service.  She put the word out on email, and it was announced on the radio and 10 people came.  I had forgotten about the Watch Night service on New Year's Eve, a tradition I grew up with at Edmonton Moravian Church.  The congregation would gather around 11:00 in the evening, and draw Watchwords from the Daily Text, a Moravian devotional book with Bible verses for each day along with a prayer and a hymn verse.  I loved drawing out my Watchword for the year. Someone, maybe the church secretary, cut apart each verse from the Daily Text and pasted each one to an index card.  Then we each took one from an offering plate.  I still have the index cards packed away somewhere.  There was an excitement in wondering what the verse would signify in the New Year, how it might resonate and guide my living.  I have a memory that the Watch Word I randomly chose one year was the same verse as the one given to me at my confirmation at age 15, Matthew 5:16, and which still resonates in the emphasis on light, which is what animates my mosaics.  In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Clare Booth Luce and the Healing Work of Mosaic

There's something about mosaics that draws people.  I came across these photos of mosaics made by the playwright(among other things, including Congresswoman) Clare Booth Luce, which she gave to Frank Lloyd Wright at his Arizona home Taliesin West.

I know Luce's name because of a play she wrote, The Women, which was also made into a movie.  Intrigued , I discovered that Luce was introduced to mosaic by Louisa Jenkins, a mosaic artist from Big Sur California.  Luce's daughter Ann, a student at Stanford, died in a car accident at 19.  In her grief, Luce converted to Catholicism and commissioned artists to design a chapel in Ann's memory at Stanford.  Louisa Jenkins created the mosaic altar at St. Ann's chapel, a Madonna with rosary.  Jenkins was drawn to sacred art, and did many works for churches.  I was sad that photos of Jenkins work on the web are almost non-existent

Through the wonders of interlibrary loan, I checked out Jenkin's book on The Art of Making Mosaics from 1957.  Her daughter Barbara Mills was a co-author, and together they have many observations that rang true.

"Any artist who has watched adults as well as children enter a studio where tables are spread with multi-colored trays of stone and glass can testify to the attraction of these materials.  Baubles of glass, clinking stones, and bits of bright crystal seem to fill a hunger in people.  To handle them is happiness."

Perhaps handling these stones and glass gave Clare Booth Luce some happiness after the death of her daughter. 

Ellen Rich, 1920-2009

I've been thinking about my grandmother this week.  She passed on December 5th, at age 89.  She was a devoted Lutheran, and these photos are of mosaics that my mother helped make in youth group at St. Timothy's Lutheran Church in El Paso, TX, a congregation that my grandmother and grandfather helped to start 55 years ago. 

I remember these mosaics from the summers we visited my grandparents.  Lutherans already seemed exotic, with their wine at communion and real bread rather than pressed white wafers, and they also had these mosaics.  My church at home was plain, a Moravian church as ordinary as a basement in a suburban home, and we had grape juice at communion to keep from leading anyone astray. 

When my mother sent these photos last month, I asked her how her youth group came to make mosaics.  She said a guy she was dating drew the outlines and the pastor went across the border to Juarez and bought bags of glass tile.  They broke them up inside plastic bags so the shards wouldn't go everywhere, glued them down close together and left the pieces ungrouted.  The mosaics have been up for 50 years and are still holding together.   

It never occurred to me that because El Paso was on the border with Mexico, this could be the source of the glass.  I love Mexican smalti; it has a variegated surface full of speckles and flecks of color.  Italy of course is the cradle of smalti mosaic glass, but in 1949, Elpidio Perdomo founded Mosaicos Venecianos de Mexico (MVM).  Mosaic became a pivotal art form in Mexico, with murals by Diego Rivera and Juan O'Gorman.  Perhaps the tiles my mother used were from MVM.  I have come full circle, now making my own mosaics with Mexican glass.  

My grandmother enjoyed my mosaics and a few years ago bought some to give as Christmas presents.  I'm glad I was able to share them with her.  This bottom mosaic is of the Luther Rose, the seal designed by Martin Luther as a symbol of his theology.  He writes about the meaning of

each color and form:  " In a word, it places the believer into a white joyful rose, for this faith does not give peace and joy as the world gives. Therefore, the rose is to be white, not red, for white is the color of the spirits and of all angels.

This rose, moreover, is fixed in a sky-blue field, symbolizing that such joy in the Spirit and in faith is a beginning of the future heavenly joy.  It is already a part of faith, and is grasped through hope, even though not yet manifest.

And around this field is a golden ring, to signify that such bliss in heaven is endless, and more precious than all joys and goods, just as gold is the most valuable and precious metal."

I know this is what my grandmother believed, and that what she grasped through hope, is now manifest.

Gratitude and Grace

As Thanksgiving approaches, I've been reflecting on gratitude.  In curiosity, I looked up the etymology of "gratitude" and discovered it is linked to the word "grace" which is God's favor or help, a pleasing quality, favor, good will, or thanks, praise, celebration, and moving deeper into resonances of beautiful form or movement, grace before meals as a form of gratitude, and finally to "grace someone with your presence." 

Gratitude is a wide place, an open space, a place where joy arises. 

This year I am grateful for:

My husband, who truly does grace me with his presence and enthusiasm for my very being.

My art, and the gift of being able to direct my creative energies into making mosaics and sharing them with others.

My friends, who provide an abundance of good will, who take the suffering out of pain and sorrow, and celebrate all that is delightful in this life.

I will be more than glad to say grace before this all, out of incomprehensible blessing.

Gifts for Ordination: Feeding the Spirit

This Galaxy Swirl Mandala became a young pastor's ordination gift, and she loved it, which makes my heart happy.  The mandala is a sacred circle, symbol of healing and wholeness, and has been used from ancient times in spiritual traditions around the globe. As I cut each piece of glass, I focus on incarnation of light that mosaics embody, a beautiful object for contemplation, embodying the spiral of our journey through life. 

At one time, I considered becoming a minister.  I even attended Moravian Theological Seminary part-time for a couple of years.  I discovered that this was not my calling.  At the time, I was writing poetry, and much of my spiritual life was worked out in words.  As I slowly began to honor my attraction to visual art, I found making mosaics a practice that embodied prayer, and many people found spiritual connection in my mandalas.  My husband has a calling to art as well, with his stained glass, and he was commissioned by a friend to make a piece for an ordination in Rome. To be part of these milestones is an honor.

I like the idea of ordination gifts that speak to the spiritual aspect of a pastor or priest, because I know from the experience of my mother and stepfather, who are in ministry, that the administrative duties can seem overwhelming, and finding ways to reconnect to the heart and soul of ministry is an oasis.

Note:  If the mandala looks familiar, it's the image we chose for a postcard that we have started sending to our mailing list.  If you have yet to get one, and you are on the list, let us know!  And if you aren't on the list, click on the newsletter tab and sign up and we'll mail you one while supplies last! 

Etsy Project Embrace: Mosaics for a Cause

While looking at UnaOdd's pendants, in their sleek and textural forms, I learned about Etsy Project Embrace, where artists of Etsy donate a percentage of their sales to the American Cancer Society in honor of Laura from http://www.creativelytangled.etsy.com, who was recently diagnosed with Ovarian cancer.  Lynn of UnaOdd is also a survivor of Ovarian cancer, as is my sister-in-law Gail.

I bought a glossy talisman-like pendant called "Chocolate Rings" from Lynn, and love wearing it, and knowing that some of the proceeds go toward a crucial cause.  I wanted to get involved, in honor of women in my life who are dealing with cancer, so I chose 3 items in the Nutmeg Designs shop to be part of Etsy Project Embrace.  The first is the Swirly Gold Heart, which is an appropriate symbol of an embrace, and 50% of the proceeds will go to the American Cancer Society.

The second is the Green Lovely Picture Frame, in shades of emerald and teal stained glass and glass tile, and Van Gogh glass, with mauve gold smalti accents in the corner.  Teal is the color of Ovarian Cancer Awareness.  This frame is on sale, so all the proceeds will go to the American Cancer Society.

Third, is the Aqua & Teal Box, with a combination of stained glass, glass tile, and gold smalti in a quilt pattern inspired square within a square design.  50% of the proceeds will go to the American Cancer Society.

To find more work in support of this important cause, search "etsyprojectembrace" on Etsy.  Take this opportunity to buy a heart-lifting mosaic that catches the light, and support the good work that the American Cancer Society does on behalf of those many people we know and love who have dealt with cancer.

Related Post:

Botanical Pendants:  UnaOdd's Lovely Art