When Milano Mosaics closed down, in the 90s, I bought their jigs. Jigs are setting trays, in which you lay out mosaic tile patterns face up. When you use one to design a tile pattern, you see it as it will be seen when fixed to the wall. Jigs ensure all the tiles are at [...]
I’m not really a moulder of men, I’m more of a fellow traveller. I think it comes from having brothers and sisters – you just have to share, or there’s big trouble from the siblings. I don’t make much of an impression on people either – they always forget they’ve ever met me, and at [...]
In the eighties, when I started working in mosaic, there were two suppliers of glass – Udny and Milano. Milano was somewhere in the outer reaches of North London. It might have been High Barnet — those depressing leafy conservative places all look the same to me.
I did enjoy the occasional trip into this unfamiliar [...]
I remember my first development trip to Stoke. I drove up the M40. Repeatedly listening to the same CD, I’d achieved a meditative high of anticipation and excitement, when the phone rang. It was a Stoke-on-Trent number. ‘Hello duck’ said an unfamiliar voice. ‘Snow is forecast. Best get here early.’ It was the landlady from [...]
It is after midnight and I am back from my assistant Sandra’s birthday party. In the Holloway Road, outside the University, I saw many young women queueing in the snow, their generous frames bulging from a tiny swaddling of baco-foil coloured fabric. ‘Goodness me, they must be cold!’ I thought, troublingly aware that my thoughts [...]
Teaching today, at the IMA in Oakland. I arrive at Fruitvale early, and wait for Celeste outside the BART station. I can’t see the IMA truck, so I find myself examining the Bingo Bugle and Classified Flea Market dispensers. What is the Bingo Bugle do you suppose?
Gave a long illustrated lecture about principles of design. [...]
In 1889 Grand Duke Ernest Ludwig wanted to bring a bit of life to the duchy of Hesse, so he decided to found an artist’s colony. He invited the fashionable young architect Joseph Maria Olbrich — architect of the Vienna Sucession Building – to come and help him. Other artists and craftsmen were invited too. [...]
Somerset, 29th June 1860.
Version 1: Constance Kent waits until the family and the servants are asleep. By dead of night she lifts her sleeping brother from his bed, takes him to a privy and cuts his throat – so brutally that he is virtually decapitated.
Version 2: Constance’s father is having an affair with his son’s [...]
Of how many mosaicists could you say this: that they have a crater on the moon named after them, a medium sized crater on Mars, an underwater ocean ridge in the Arctic, an entire city on the Gulf of Finland (where Stravinsky was born) and that Russia’s largest university bears their name — because [...]
The church of the ‘Saviour on the Blood’ in St Petersburg is a former cathedral founded on a titillatingly gruesome basis. Alexander II was a reformist Tsar who oversaw the Emancipation of the Serfs. He was subject to many assassination attempts, one of which succeeded. The ‘Saviour on the Blood’ was built over the cobblestones [...]