Is A Mosaicist Born Or Made?
My assistant Sandra agreed it was a good idea to publish my list of funeral songs. They were slightly obscure, she thought. This way my wishes might be remembered. We discussed it as we travelled by train to York. Gloom, exhaustion and snow made driving seem a bad idea. As we sped through the Fens the landscape was grey. The railway cuttings were fringed with hawthorns heavy with berries. I used to collect these as a child and hang them in muslin bags from my bedroom ceiling. The aim was to dry them and feed them to the birds in winter. They jostled for space alongside photos of people being shot, icons of the ‘Underground’ ( a 60s word referring to the groovy and long-haired music scene) given away free as centrefolds in the newly published ‘Sounds’ magazine, and drawings I’d made of Christ and the thieves on the cross, carefully executed in Rotring pen. Love of birds went hand in hand with an interest in drawing. I copied ornithological imagery from books to try and impress my parents. These pencil drawings did not accompany me to the psychiatrist, unlike the multiple images of Christ in torment, which did.
I had an individual approach to food, when I was young. I divided and subdivided everything I ate. My parents had a name for this habit. They said I was a ‘particle-ist’. It all made sense when I finally started to work with mosaic.
Early toy of the mosaicist Emma Biggs
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