Mosaic

In the eighties, the word ‘studio’ was everywhere. Its vaguely arty associations meant it was used to sell everything from real estate to packaging. I wanted a name for my new mosaic company.

Mosaic Studio?

Over my dead body!

It had to be a word that suggested creative endeavour could be rooted in earnest toil and cooperative values. Verbally it should 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’. I could understand the attitude, it was 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