Mosaic

I worked on my own for about a year. After a while I hired Tessa. I was happy to have her. She was a qualified architect, and understood technical issues. She was paid by the hour. Money was tight, and life became increasingly difficult. ‘Let’s just split the funds when we get them’ she suggested, and we did.

We made a baptistery floor for a Catholic church in the north of England. Fixing it, we stayed with the priest. His house was bare and chilly. ‘Help yourself to breakfast’ he said. Rising early, we toasted two pieces of sliced white bread and made a pot of coffee. ‘ I see you’ve helped yourself to the expensive stuff’ he said disapprovingly. We felt ashamed.

We worked every day. The studio window faced the school opposite. When it was break-time my children waved from the playground. The house groaned with more and more materials. Fruit boxes of glass and ceramic of every colour filled the hall. ‘Don’t your children cut their feet on the splinters?’ people asked. ‘No’ I said.

Money got tighter. The phone rang. It was an architect working on behalf of an Australian tycooness. ‘She’d like to come to the house to see you’ he said. ‘That would be great!’ I lied.

The house was shabby. Two limousines pulled up. From one car, a uniformed man opened the door to a tiny, elderly woman on very high heels. From the other, the glossy architect emerged.

‘Well, Emma, I like your style!’ she said. And with those words, the marble mosaic floor for the penthouse of New York’s Pierre Hotel was commissioned.

‘I thought she’d fall down the holes in the floorboards’ I said to Tessa. ‘So did I’ she agreed.

We’d have to buy a noisy marble machine. What would the neighbours make of that?

Marble mosaic floor by Tessa, of much later vintage. Miranda in the workshop in Holloway Road. Fruit boxes still in evidence.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs
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In the eighties, the word ‘studio’ was everywhere. Its vaguely arty associations meant it was used to sell everything from real estate to packaging. At that time I wanted a name for my new mosaic company.

Mosaic Studio?

No!

It had to be a word that suggested creative endeavour could be rooted in earnest toil and cooperative values.  It needed verbally to hold back the roaring tsunami of conservatism. What model could there possibly be?

Maybe Wiener Werkstätte (the Vienna Workshops) whose philosophy was: ‘Better to make one product in ten days than to make ten in one day’. That was an attitude I could understand, a challenge to consumer culture. Mosaic Workshop – that’s what I would call it.

We shared our house with a parliamentary correspondent. I had a baby, another was on the way. The strains of Dylan’s ‘Baby Please Stop Crying’ could be heard from the journalist’s room. He might not be there much longer, we inferred.

When he moved out, his room became my studio. ‘Not studio, workshop!’ I insisted.

I made mosaic samples and hawked them round some shops. Two days later, the phone rang. ‘Would you like to make two floors for a cactus house?’ a voice enquired. It was my first job.

Last week I went out for a drink with my former colleagues. The previous week, we’d closed our Holborn shop. Time, I thought, to tell some stories about Mosaic Workshop. Here is a picture of the cactus house floor, my first job.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: Emma Biggs > Mosaic Workshop > one woman's fight against conservative culture > Wiener Werkstätte
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In the heat of preparing for an exhibition or delivering a project, I find it easy to put off petty administrative tasks. Yesterday I dealt with some I have prevaricated over for months. It may be convenient to be too busy for tedium, but behaviour of that kind can have catastrophic consequences.

Yesterday I spent the morning putting in an application for a public art project. Today is the deadline for applications, so the envelope needed to be sent by special delivery. In the afternoon I agreed to do a job, one I’d hoped to be saved from having to undertake, but financial salvation is taking its time. I phoned up, longing for it to have been offered to someone else, but it was still mine.

Why, at my advanced age, do I still have this problem, one that as a teenager perenially made me the last student to deliver my school homework? It must be possible to seek psychological help, but shouldn’t I simply use willpower to stop this childishness?

The answer is probably at my fingertips, but when I look at models of rectitude and good behaviour, I am defensive rather than insightful. Other people may be good at answering their e-mails, but do they spend as as much time as I do clearing up? It is great living in a carefree bohemian household, but you can feel grumpy when the bohemians are sleeping it off while you are washing the stairs, I think, defensively.

I spoke to my mother yesterday, who told me she had spent the weekend clearing up letters on my father’s desk dating from 2003. My behaviour could be worse, I suppose.

Being a good bohemian.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: coping with tedium > idiotic behaviour > making excuses > prevarication
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I have been tricky company for the past few days. In this state, everything around me becomes a mess. If a box of cubes falls to the floor, I am incapable of clearing it up. The problem stems from being stuck in a creative rut. I am able to write this as I have finally found a way out of the problem – but I have searched for almost a week, and found only exits I have found before.

I have been experimenting with new materials. The colours are inspiring, the materials are interesting, but every combination I put together looks either flat or familiar. I have been working direct, for the speed of the process, but although I can make local relationships work, the overall effect is pedestrian. I don’t give up. I chop out the work, and start again. Piles of adhesive covered materials build up on every surface. My new experiment is not working. I try something else. It doesn’t work either. I get out the hammer, and create even more trays of cubes and adhesive coated smalti soaking in water. The chaotic surroundings seem to reflect my state of mind, it’s out of control, but I can’t tidy up. Old cups and tea and coffee fill the studio. I can’t take the time to sweep the floor. Somehow, from the chaos, the solution will appear. In the meantime, everything looks worse and worse. I work until I no longer care, until the experiments are desperate, nihilistic and absurd. At the point where I am really out of control, something genuinely playful arrives. I am surprised by what I see. The blackness lifts, and I have a feeling of real delight.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: artist's block > creative depression > creative play > experimental mosaic > feeling stuck > the uses of nihilism
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I caught an early train to Stoke-on-Trent yesterday. I tried to buy a coffee from the buffet bar. ‘The machine is playing up, what do you want to do?’ the inattendant enquired, before resuming her hilarious phone conversation. Was she suggesting I might want a tea instead? I wasn’t sure.

It was pouring when I reached Longport. I attempted to avoid the puddles in my leaky shoes. The Price and Kensington tea-pot factory looked inviting beside the canal, as the rain sheeted into the water. Articulated lorries sped alongside me on their way to the A500 sending up architectural wings of spray with their wheels. A burglar alarm howled on a now deserted potbank – perhaps the wind had set it off.

‘Shall we go for breakfast at Tunstall Market?’ my friend Pam suggested. ‘Good idea!’ I agreed. We settled in at the Market Grill. Behind us, a Salvation Army officer was collecting funds, dressed in full uniform and hat. At the counter a beautiful woman with a beehive hair-do was having a cup of tea. She wore a nylon apron. Maybe she worked on one of the stalls. The market was busy, and the café was thronged with young and old. Beside us an elegant matron with platinum hair and a black fur coat grasped a mug of tea with red leather gloved hands.  Her scarlet snakeskin handbag lay on the adjoining table. Pam and I decided we would have the Full English – eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, tomatoes and toast.

‘Worked in a potbank, a factory or other noisy environment?’ enquired two young men at the market entrance, as I got up to look around. They were touting for business for their deafness tests. They asked twice before I understood the question.

When I returned, two locals had joined us at our table. One of them was wearing respiratory prongs in her nose. I wondered if she had emphysema. It is a hazard of a life spent in the potteries, but I felt abashed to ask. ‘Come up from London, duck?’ the chattier of the two enquired. ‘Have you just finished University?’

‘Well there’s a compliment for you!’ laughed Pam. ‘I would call that a compliment!’ she repeated, so they understood they’d got it a little wrong. Internally I felt the prong woman probably needed her sight tested. She chatted unguardedly about her friends and relatives. ‘My brother has a lovely girlfriend. He met her on the internet. She comes from Macclesfield.’ When we announced it was time to get the bus to Hanley, their faces fell. ‘It was lovely to meet you.’ I said, truthfully.

Crowds queued in the rain to get into the Potteries Museum. Over the past few days 28,000 people have been through its doors, to see the recently discovered Anglo-Saxon treasure, a haul of gold of astonishing beauty,  known as the ‘Staffordshire Hoard’. I skipped the queues, as I was there to see Geoffrey Snow, Treasurer of the Friends of the Museum. He is typical of Stoke people in a different way. Beautifully dressed, patient, intelligent and generous, he puts a lot of effort in to charitable work for the local community. He gave me several hours of his time and expertise, causing him to miss lunch. All morning he’d been hard at work on the Gift Aid desk. If the Staffordshire Hoard is to stay in Stoke – and all the locals are committed to it doing so – the Museum must raise three million pounds. Yesterday they achieved a significant target –  the first million.

When our meeting was over, we went back to the Gift Aid desk. ‘Are you all right?’ Geoffrey asked his colleague. ‘No, I am not’ she said. ‘I am hungry, and I haven’t had a break since first thing this morning’.

Geoffrey wasn’t going to get anything to eat.

‘Show us what to do, and we’ll collect the funds’ I suggested. He did, and Pam and I took our turn collecting donations to keep the Staffordshire Hoard. The generosity of the locals was mind-boggling. From pounds to pence, almost everyone seemed to have something to give. Who wouldn’t value a community like that?

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: best city in UK > Geoffrey Snow > Market Grill > Price & Kensington > rain in Longport > Stoke-on-Trent > The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery > The Staffordshire Hoard Appeal > Tunstall Market
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A couple of months ago one of my students made a mosaic from sherds he found on the Thames foreshore. His work had striking originality and flair.  It wasn’t  tidily executed, in fact it was made in a way that almost seemed to re-write the rules that apply in making an effective mosaic. There are very few mosaic artists for whom the energy and power of realisation overrides any considerations of execution – Ilana Shafir is perhaps one. I have always thought of her as an exception. But this young man – his name is Ondřej Vyhnánek — is another.

It is not that the themes he chooses are particularly original – he focuses on faces – often slightly cartoony, graffiti-like — with a note of the surreal or absurd. On the weekend course he made an image of a cat smoking a cigar. It doesn’t sound particularly promising does it? But there is something about the painterly way  he uses colour, surface and materials that is really compelling and boundary-breaking.

He wrote this week and sent some images of recent work. He has a full time job, with very little time, space, or opportunity to make mosaic. These constraints mean he is currently working small, but looking forward to returning to the Czech Republic so he can see things through on a grander scale.  I am sure this won’t be the last you hear of him.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: Ilana Shafir > Ondřej Vyhnánek > painterly mosaic
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The private view is over. Yesterday we gave a talk about ‘Pattern Industry’ at the Slade School of Fine Art. The talk was in the Darwin Lecture theatre, built on a site in Gower Street where Darwin once lived. Matt has been filming this week, so I put together the presentation. He responded spontaneously to the images as they appeared. The BBC filmed our lecture – for ‘Beautiful Equations’, a programme examining correspondences between elegance and beauty in a scientific idea, and those of a beautiful work of art.

The film crew came to the private view — with many turbo-brained scientists, invited along by the director. The worlds of art and science do not regularly collide, and the scientists seemed politely baffled. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before’ one of them confided. I tried to impress my nephew Felix (a maths and science whiz) with their eminence, but I am so scientifically ignorant that I couldn’t remember their names. ‘I imagine there is a mathematical principle behind your paintings?’ one of them enquired. ‘Possibly,’ said Matt, ‘but they are done intuitively.’

When the Slade talk was over, there were questions about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. I can be a nervous interviewee, but I felt safe on this ground, as I have thought a great deal about why we make what we do, and how social issues raised in my work in mosaic inform the painting.

After the lecture was over we joined the students for a meal. It was in celebration of Chinese New Year. Thirty of us sat round a huge circular table  at the top of a grand staircase in the painting department. I had the good luck to be next to a bright young artist called Tom, who talked knowledgeably about Slavoj Zizek, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. ‘How much is theory part of the course?’ I asked.  ‘We are told about it, but the reading is something we do for our own interest.’ he replied. After the meal Andrew Stahl, Head of Undergraduate Painting, took us on a tour of the studios. Industrious students were still hard at work at nine o’clock at night.

The relationship between theory and practice can be complex and obscure, we both agreed on the bus home.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: Beautiful Equations > Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings > Pattern Industry > Slade School of Fine Art
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I have installed the show, as Matt has been on a research trip in Europe for the past fortnight. Intermittent texts document his travels:

‘Stuck in snowdrift. Have to turn round. V. hard to manoeuvre’. Or

‘The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is staggering. Dozens of Titians, Veroneses and Tintorettos in room after room, and the rooms are all enormous.’ Or:

‘On way to Brussels.’

He didn’t return to days of empty idleness. There was plenty of work piled up for him. Writing frantically for the past couple of days, he was keen to come to the gallery and have a look at the show. He phoned yesterday afternoon. He was on his way. ‘I’ll be there in a minute’ he said. ‘Where are you, exactly?’ I asked. ‘I’m just walking down the Holloway Road.’

Two hours on, he still hadn’t arrived. I rang him. Eventually he answered. ‘Where have you been?’ I asked. ‘It was cold’ he said. I had to have a rest.’

I would have liked a rest too. But tolerance is a wifely virtue.

Matt was tired and depressed. Things had been difficult.. He’d like to have a cocktail, he said. ‘Yes, and something to eat’ I suggested. ‘Hmm’ he replied.

‘If it’s raining like this, no one will come to our show’ he said.

I woke up today and the rain was still pouring. Matt groaned. ‘I’ve been vomiting all night. I have food poisoning.’

‘Oh dear, how terrible! What a bad day for it. But why haven’t I got it? We ate the same thing last night didn’t we?’

‘I can’t say. I feel ill thinking about it.’

‘What could it have been?’

‘I rested at Crystal Kebab.’

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs
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Earlier this week, as I worked, the phone trilled.  Multiple messages told me there was an old picture of Matt and David Bowie in the Guardian. ‘Have you seen it yet?’ ‘No’ I said.

This morning, as I prepared to leave the house for the gallery, a chat box popped up on the computer screen, alerting me with a squawk. It was my daughter.

‘Did you see my message?’ she demanded.

‘No.’ I replied.

‘Read it! Read it now!’

I clicked the inbox, but my laptop is slow, tired, and at the limit of its available memory. A message appeared, vanished, and the computer froze.

The chat box squawked again. ‘Have you read it yet?’

‘No.’ I tried to answer, but the message disappeared.

After multiple attempts, the message opened up. ‘Be prepared.’ It began ominously.

‘Best night of my life’ it ended. There were tales of success with writing, handsome men, fashion shows, intimate gigs with Axl Rose, and other excitements. ‘I’ve just got back here’, it read.

She’d been four feet away from Axl Rose. She was impressed.

As we installed the mosaic at the gallery a distinguished bearded gentleman came down the stairs. ‘A mosaic!’ he observed. ‘Are you going to grout it?’

We don’t plan to, I said. ‘It’s made from medieval fragments, and they have to go back into boxes in the Museum collection, where they came from.’

‘Ah!’ he said, tolerantly. ‘I made a mosaic once. Under the water it looked rather good! It was in a pool, you see.’

‘So you are an artist?’ I surmised.

‘Yes. Indeed. And so was my father.’ He opened up a carrier bag in a slightly conspiratorial way. Inside was an Edward Bawden catalogue. ‘I am his son Richard’.

Now I was impressed.

My father had a heather farm. His name is Richard too.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: Axl Rose > Claudine Biggs > David Bowie > Edward Bawden > Hartley Heather Farm > Matthew Collings > Richard Biggs
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Through the studio security window – a fold-away grill of metal diamonds, I can see the snow is falling. Big white blobs, in lovely swirling flurries. A lace curtain hangs in front of the glass, threaded with a pattern of white circles over a lattice of elongated squares. Visual rhymes — once you’ve started noticing them, they won’t leave you alone.

In the run up to our show I have been looking at pattern, studying images of a variety of textiles.  Pattern can be frank – a series of simple repeats, or it can be complex and layered, distorted by folds, light, or reflection. It can be gendered too – more about this soon. And pattern doesn’t have to be predictable – in fact it is much more interesting if it isn’t. Here are some patterned walls from the Paris Metro. The photographs are by George Walker. If anyone knows more about this work, do get in touch.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: George Walker > Mosaic in Paris Metro > mosaic pattern > pattern
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