Mosaic Elements

Coming Soon to a Wall Near You

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The Mosaic Elements are all ready to go. Now I need to figure out how to present this new offering. I want to convey that Mosaic Elements can transform your space, like magic. Your glance is rewarded with a moment of surprise and discovery as you decipher the sparkling forms. The image in reflectant glass and gold shimmers and shifts as you move. You can transform your space in an instant by hanging Mosaic Elements just the way you want—in singles, multiples, as repeated motifs—and by changing it up as often as you like. Step 1: The Concept

Short of traipsing to every last friend’s home to snap pictures of Mosaic Elements perched precariously in kitchens, bathrooms and living rooms I’ve been stumped by how to communicate this vision. My idea-guy husband suggested testing these magical properties of Mosaic Elements by transforming something that’s clearly un-transformable. Say an EL viaduct or a crumbling concrete bridge or steel girder or construction fence. Take away the distraction of a limiting, specific context and let the Mosaic Elements work their magic on a fully imaginary, technically impossible setting. Love it. Game on.

Step 2: How to Temporarily Affix the Mosaic Elements

Today was spent figuring out how to affix the Mosaic Elements to crumbling concrete. Several products and as many trips to Home Depot later, I discovered the wondrous 3M Scotch Outdoor Mounting Tape. The tape is weather resistant and works on rough exterior surfaces. Four inches of the tape holds up to 5 lbs. Weighing in at a pound, the Mosaic Elements are light and need just a couple inches of tape. Tested it. Perfect! One giant roll is now en route from Amazon.

Here are the concept pictures shot on the cement wall outside my studio door.

Stay tuned for Step 3: Locating the perfect urban wasteland.

See all Mosaic Elements

About Glyph

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Glyph. n. Any computer-generated character regarded in terms of its shape and bit pattern. An image used in the visual representation of characters; roughly speaking, how a character looks. A font is a set of glyphs.

I love letter forms. Interesting fonts and typefaces, elegant calligraphy, letter stencils, text-based street art, even a well-crafted tag will catch my eye.

The power of language to inform, connect and create is a longstanding obsession for me. In my previous career as a speech language pathologist, I worked with adults to rebuild communication skills after illness or injury. The structured combination of sounds or letters forms the basis of information exchange and social connection. So as I see it, these minimal information units possess potential energy.

It was after I saw the documentary Helvetica that I realized the key to addressing this idea of potential linguistic energy lay in the letter’s visual form. Helvetica, directed by Gary Hustwit and released on the font’s 50th anniversary in 2007, is a marvelous story of the font’s creation and subsequent domination of public space owing to its fresh, rational form with balanced positive and negative space. In this documentary, something easily overlooked as trivial or mundane is re-framed as a powerful, even controversial tool: visual form matters.

In the Glyph series, the potential creative energy of the letter is explored using abstracted letter forms (yes, in Helvetica) re-envisioned as organic shapes. Positive and negative space is reversed with glass coursing out from the negative space letter form. The viewer is offered a visual puzzle: a letter fragment from which to discern the whole.

Pieces in the first Glyph series in 2007 were cut from vitreous glass tile in a palette of steel blues and grass greens.

Coming back to Glyph recently, I have refined the work by using sheet glass, clarifying the cutting and adding a tiny 24k gold element in the negative space. As one of my Mosaic Elements series, Glyph is a bold graphic composition with endless creative potential.