What I found really interesting about Reddy Lieb was her Artist-in-Residence at Recology San Francisco, aka the garbage dump in 2000. She described one of her installations as inspired by the Greek goddess, Demeter; her stint with junk got her into an MFA program at the California College of Art, which is a dream of mine--to learn at art school! Reddy has been working with glass for over 30 years, and she creates both conceptual and functional work, using recycled materials. Do a Google search of her images--gorgeous and interesting. This tempered glass mosaic workshop was my first time at SCRAP, and I had a lot of fun "shopping" the aisles of the warehouse for materials to put into my mosaic. I had already brought images of mermaids and text that I knew I wanted incorporated into a ocean-themed creation. A classmate had scrounged a wooden wine crate and rejected an interesting wooden box that I immediately pounced on--the shallow hinged box had some foam stuck inside on one half and interesting compartments inside the other half as well as the Japanese brand name "Mitutoyo" outside of the box. A label on the side indicated that it had held a caliper. The first photo below shows the hanging hooks and wire I've since attached to hang my mosaic.
Another classmate foraged a box of origami papers, and I knew I wanted the shiny, foil paper in blues, teals and greens to reflect through the crash glass. I also scrounged seashells, driftwood, calendar images of ships on a stormy ocean, and a National Geographic map from the nooks and cubbies of SCRAP. We spent the morning assembling our collages and gluing paper with Elmer's glue into our containers or window or picture frame or altar, then eating lunch while letting our assemblages dry in the sun, and afterward breaking and gluing our tesserae with Weld Bond over our collages in the afternoon.
On the second day we finished our mosaics with colored grouts to enhance the designs. Reddy suggested that I mix two different colored grouts--blue and yellow--and then press them into opposite ends of my bits and pieces and bring the blue and yellow together in the middle to "ombre" into sea green--brilliant! I nixed the driftwood and filled the shells with scented wax to glue onto the wood dividers of my box/window. I really love my art piece--not functional, but so fun to have made and to look at.
Below are some more images from my classmates at this SCRAP workshop. Some of them are not grouted because they were still adhering crash glass over their assemblages. My classmate who made a "Goddess" collage of her favorite artist's calendar later gave me an illustration of a mermaid. The styrofoam head makes me want to play with this mosaic method on 3-D pieces like my ceramic hearts, and I just love the oranges and reds and purples of my tablemate, Helen's mosaic of her travel to India. I showed my mosaic to the ceramics teacher at one of my high schools and proposed that her advanced ceramic students create an indoor mosaic installation for my library, using crash glass--looking forward to working more with crash glass!
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