Sonia found the turquoise glazes very alluring. She has been using this colour in a wonderful series of mosaics titled ‘Nebula Aqua’ for a San Francisco home. Each ‘nebula’ is made from mineral specimens, glass fusions, beads, shell, smalti, stone, and a wealth of materials of similar hue. Sonia’s real interest is in texture, and the reflective properties of the tesserae. The mosaics sparkle and glint as you move. Having seen them at a number of different times of day, I noticed that as the light fades, the shine from the curved glass diminishes, and the light cast by the opalescent material increases. The effect is impressively mutable. Set into black mortar, they sit on a granular rendered wall. Setting these elements is technically very difficult. The edges of the nebulae alone are masterpieces.

This is a picture of my cat by the photographer Louise Haywood-Shiefer. The appeal of the image really comes from the blast of contrast — the black and white of the cat, and the band of brilliant colour given by the mosaic tiles on the left. The colour of the photograph is very reduced and keyed to white.  The white of the cat almost fuses with the white of the background, and it is this that boosts the intensity of her gaze, adds brilliance to the green of her eyes, and increases a sense of the tender pink of her nose. The image is recogniseable, but what you are seeing is a photographic stylisation — the photographer has used the camera to see some things and to exclude others.

I have to teach students that image making is about selection, and about making the selected elements seem to lock together. I can imagine a student — not because any student has ever done it with this image, but because people see in this way all the time — finding this image attractive, and wanting to reproduce it. And my imaginary student might observe that you can see a house through the window. And because the house has yellow bricks, I can imagine them being included, not because they can see them in the image, but because the student knows they are there.  And suddenly the balance of the whole image is utterly thrown, and one clarification of the photograph seems to require another, and on and on until the entire image, with its strange white atmosphere, has entirely vanished, and a new colourful world has appeared, one in which the cat is much less ghostly and gripping.

For more fascinating lessons like this, you will have to buy the book Sonia King and I are writing, when we have finished writing it — which will definitely be soon!