This mosaic, Pulse, was the first in what became my Lines series. I was inspired by Brit Hammer’s “stripes” mosaics and wanted to take the idea of working in lines and make it my own.
Pulse (2008) 11.25" x 30" | 26cm x 76cm. Marble, granite, smalti, piastrina, glass, hematite, mother of pearl, quartz, ceramic, porcelain, pearls, mosaic gold, Swarovski crystal. In a private collection.
I started this work at the end of 2007 and it carried over into 2008. We had a terrible ice storm that year that caused wide-spread power outages. We had no electricity for a week. My husband went to work, along with our two kids who I was home-schooling at the time. I stayed home with our dogs and tried to keep working on this mosaic.
The temperature inside the house got down into the 50s which made it difficult to work. Also, it was rather dark for mosaicking. I moved downstairs into the kitchen to work, which had a little more exterior light coming in, and was also warmer due to the fireplace.
Pulse, detail
In this work, I was expressing that my heart beats in the shades of gray, not in the extremes of black and white. I can muck around in the gray shades around all manner of life issues for hours on end.
I was inspired by these lines from a Rumi poem:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.”― Rumi, from A Great Wagon