SI #3

Guiding Statements: Exploring combining the style of famous historical mosaics and a childhood mosaic toy.

Exploring how to mosaic a water lily from childhood.

Materials: Grout, wooden 8x8 board, stoneware

Processes: Cutting and shaping tiles, glazing, gluing and placing, grouting

Resources: Reference pictures of water lilies, Antonio Gaudi mosaics, and Youtube tutorials

Reflection of Work

I wanted to make a mosaic of a water lily in a picture-book manner because those two things remind me of my childhood. I grew up on a pond with water lilies on it, so I have a lot of memories with those flowers. I also had a mosaic art toy with little magnetic pieces and paper templates that I love to use. When I was creating my tiles, I tried to make them with rounded edges and glazed them with simple, bright colors to give the feeling of a storybook illustration. To give the mosaic more dimension, I made the lily and the lilypads 3-D to pop off the flat surface of the board, and off the surface of the water as they do in real life. As I was laying out my tiles and gluing them on, I had to discard a few pieces and move them around to make sure they fit together on the 8” x 8” board as cohesively as possible. After the glue set, I put grout in the cracks, which was something I’d never done before - but I think I did a good job. When the grout dried, I wiped away any excess still left, sanded the edges, signed the back, and I was done. 

I sketched out several plans to make sure the design I had was what I wanted. As this was my first time doing a mosaic, I cut out a set of practice tiles and did each step to those before the final ones, except for gluing and grouting. I also had to keep coming back to my goal of making it storybook-like and used that to guide my glaze and tile shape choices. 

As I move on from this piece, I feel like my guiding question of getting inspiration from historical ceramics styles is too open-ended. I really enjoyed making the piece before this (SI#2) and I’m shifting that element of my question to exploring the maiolica style to specifically influence the surface of my forms. 

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