Mosaic

Sophie Ryder ‘Blue Lady’

Sophie Ryder

Roman mosaic from Tunisia

I see that Sophie Ryder has been making mosaics, her recent exhibition in Halifax included the mosaic ‘Blue Lady’ which was on display at Dean Clough Mills. Her images reminded me of when I was in Greece and looking at the mosaics set into the floor of a very ancient villa. Ryder has had to use the mosaic way of simplifying form and in doing so she gives her images a timeless or perhaps 'set into time' quality. I have worked at what was Leeds College of Art for well over 40 years and over the doorway to the Vernon Street entrance the old mosaic mural still welcomes new students into the profession. 

The mosaic mural above the Vernon Street entrance to Leeds Arts University

Eric Taylor who used to be a principal of the college was also an accomplished mural designer and his mural for the Merrion Centre was relocated to the walls of the college's new Blenheim Walk building, when the walls hosting it were knocked down as part of a refurbishment scheme. 

Eric Taylor mosaic murals

Eric Taylor mosaic murals in their previous location

I have always loved Eric's murals, the juxtaposition of a rural scene set into the walls of a what was a then new shopping arcade, with the centre's raw brutalist carpark design, used to be like flowers growing through the cracks of a concrete pavement. But mosaic traditions also include the early Christian Church and in Greece the mosaic tradition carried on and the tradition of Greek orthodox icons ensured that a powerful simplicity of form was maintained. It is for myself fascinating that the term mosaic is likely derived from the Greek word “mousa,” meaning “work of the muses.”

Greek orthodox mosaic

A detail of eyes changes our relationship with a bowl carried by I presume by St Lucy. Suddenly the bowl is animate, it has as they say agency and it stares at us with mystic eyes perhaps coming from older more magical traditions. 

3rd century Tunisia

I find a mosaic surface mesmerising and visually hypnotic, therefore prefect for an image depicting magical ideas, or other worldly issues. Mosaic is usually associated with public spaces, and it often graces the entrances of large public buildings. I have for some time now had an interest in the mosaics that you pass when entering the National Gallery. 

Winston Churchill as 'Defiance' 

Bertrand Russell as 'Lucidity'

When you enter the front portico of the National Gallery you will see a series of mosaics by the Russian artist Boris Vasilyevich Anrep, the ones of Churchill and Russell above are from the 1950s. When you look at them closely you begin to realise they are very strange and Anrep's representations have a surreal edge made even more so by the process of mosaic itself. Because it is very hard to get any precise detail into a mosaic, you are forced to be inventive with form and in that process of simplification the work removes itself away from verisimilitude and heads into abstract territory, well it does normally, Chuck Close's work being the exception that proves the rule, but more on that later. 

The London School of Mosaic still operates courses up to degree level for anyone wanting to study this old craft and you can find several contemporary examples on the walls of the underground, such as the one by Eduardo Paolozzi below. 

Eduardo Paolozzi, Tottenham Court Tube station

I was over at the Venice Biennale last week and encountered mosaic again, Zsófia Keresztes' mosaic covered sculptures that filled the Hungarian pavilion being hard to miss. 

Zsófia Keresztes: Wilting Sympathy

Keresztes is an artist that draws in order to find her imagery. You can see her mind working when you look at her drawings perhaps easier than when you see her final sculptures. She had this to say about her drawing above, “The twin boots feed off each other’s sadness. Under the pressure of their crushing teardrops, a single flower blooms out of the split of their conjoined body. The crop of their blooming empathy perishes under the teeth of their solid ground-searching heels.” Her imagery comes from a deeply personal but poetic sensibility and like several artists at the moment she has a sensibility that recognises the non binary nature of aesthetics, embracing fluidity and hybridity. The use of mosaic helps her to harmonise all the disparate elements that emerge in her ideas.

Zsófia Keresztes

I was interested to see Marcel Proust quoted in relation to her work, in particular his notion of memory as ‘real but not actual, ideal but not abstract’. A definition I would think could apply to perception as well. Keresztes is also interested in how the virtual makes us think about objects. You often think of things in the virtual world as if they were real, and so as a sculptor I can imagine she became interested in how digital objects might manifest themselves in a 'real', if there is one, world. Her bulbous forms, which I was interested to see are carved into styrofoam and fiberglass layers, are overlaid with hand-cut glass tiles, the quality of which reminds me of public lavatories and tiled underpasses from the 1960s and 70s, however I think she uses the small area of a tiny tile to represent a pixel and therefore making an analogy with a digital surface. Keresztes also draws and her image 'Wilting Sympathy' is typical of an approach to drawing that gives us an intense experience of surface texture, this time using coloured pens to build up her surfaces rather than mosaic tiles.

Another artist that was interested in how digital images need to break surfaces down into tiny areas in order to achieve optical blends was Chuck Close and he was at one time producing (or having produced) very large mosaic portraits made from photographs. 

Chuck Close: detail

I can see what Close is getting at as he spent years copying photographs by gridding them up and carefully working small square by small square to reproduce them. The grid then became a space to play within and he started to loosen up his paint technique whilst still being able to use the grid's control over the final reading of the image. Even so it seemed to be that this was a heck of a lot of work to make what is at the end of the day a point about reproduction and how the eyes work to form holistic images from lots of bits of information.  

Hundertwasser

If you are interested in mosaic as an architectural possibility look at Hundertwasser's work, he is worth investigating for his views on our relationship with the earth and his belief that we need to work against architecture's geometric dictates and look towards a more biomorphic architectural future. 

Gaudí

Hundertwasser is following in the footsteps of Gaudí and if you want to really appreciate the possibilities of mosaic at scale you ought to go to Barcelona and visit his work in situ. 

Mosaic is one of those techniques that sits on the fence between drawing and painting. On the one hand it can be very linear, as you layout the tiles you can design using edges and see your image development as one coming from a drawing based tradition. On the other hand it can be seen as very painterly, colour being applied in small patches very like brushstrokes. 

Remember that old technologies can always be re-invented, and that mosaic in particular has a lot of potential, especially if you want to work in public spaces, as it is very robust and hard to damage. Sometimes you just need to see what happens to existing imagery when it has to go through a process of severe simplification. It helps with an understanding of an image's readability and its ability to withstand severe distortion and still be effective. 

A halved apple with pips: Detail from a mosaic floor in the Leeds Victorian arcades

See also:

Drawing with stencils

Silverpoint drawing

Graffiti 

Tattoo art

More on the grid

How to pay attention: More on Chuck Close

Visualising the invisible More on Hundertwasser

Barbara Walker at Turner Contemporary

I have mentioned the work of Barbara Walker before, and there is now a chance to go and see her work in the flesh because she has a residency at Turner Contemporary in Margate. I think the way that she deals with the ephemeral and the need to give gravitas to people that are seldom given much thought is very interesting. She draws directly on the walls of the spaces that she is exhibiting within. These drawings are often simply wiped out at the end of the period of exhibition. The process of removal being as poignant as the process of construction. The people she often chooses to draw are found on the edges of society, which makes their rubbing out feel so tragic. However the fact that when she is drawing them, she gives them a monumental size helps to redress the balance. For a while at least their status is elevated and their presence made strong and unavoidable, as they step out of the margins and take a command of the gallery space. I have mentioned the conceptual possibilities inherent when making drawings with unfixed charcoal before. There is a temporality that is very fragile in an unfixed charcoal drawing, Barbara Walker is obviously very aware of this and the fact that these are in effect 'dust' drawings, and charcoal is itself a burnt stick. 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust' being perhaps the underlying poetic sensibility of these images.

This is how the gallery introduces Walker and her work.

"Place, Space and Who is a new commission by British, Birmingham-based artist Barbara Walker, which explores migration and the experiences of women living in Margate.

Walker will create a series of large-scale wall drawings directly onto the gallery walls, during a four-month residency in the space. From the 30th April 2019, visitors will be able to see the artwork evolve and grow.

Over 20 years Walker has developed a practice of drawing, painting and portraiture, often creating large-scale drawings directly onto walls. Growing up in Birmingham her experiences have directly shaped a practice concerned with class and power, gender, race, representation and belonging. Her figurative paintings and drawings are informed by the social, political and cultural realities that affect her life and the lives of those around her."

For more information see Turner Contemporary 

See also

Drawing and politics part two

Drawing using tape

As it's getting close to Christmas, I thought it perhaps time to think about drawings made with adhesive tape. You will no doubt use a lot of it over the next few weeks, but as always we need to ask the question what are its possibilities as a drawing material for artists? 

Tape as a medium appears amongst a variety of artists' practices and can serve a wide range of functions.  

Jim Lambie

Jim Lambie uses tape for its decorative qualities, as well as its ability to stretch across large areas of floor space. Tape is often used to traverse architectural space, its a lot easier to work with than paint, there are no drying times and when worked with carefully the thin lines can have an almost mesmeric effect. The hallucinatory quality of the zig zag pattern has been recognised by many cultures, Lambie's use being not that dissimilar to the way Australian Aboriginal peoples used this pattern. Dance cultures can range from hip-hop to the 10,000 year old dances performed at the Laura Aboriginal Dance Festival, the zig zag often accompanying these dances as their visual cousin.

Aboriginal Wunda Shield

The Polish artist Monika Grzymala uses tape to explore architectural space in a variety of ways. Sometimes she is using tape to create barriers, at other times to wrap surfaces or to join elements, then at other times she is using it to make a more decorative surface and at others to create a narrative. Look at the way she cuts tiny shards out of the tape to create an explosive effect.

Monika Grzymala 

The Korean artist Sun K. Kwak, uses a scalpel to cut more organic shapes and lines through her taped wall surfaces. She will have researched different tapes and produced several trials and tests before deciding on the tape used. Tape comes in a wide variety of thicknesses and in particular some industrial tapes are worth researching for their colour and surface qualities alongside their availability in large amounts and wide formats.

Sun K. Kwak

Edward A Burke

Edward A Burke uses tape more like a traditional painting medium, each piece of tape operating as if it is a brush stroke of paint, whilst Alex Menocal creates wall drawings in a similar way to Michael Craig-Martin. His half taken down image below is of particular interest because of the way it reveals the process of its making. The hanging tape becomes the drawing, so we switch our reading from tape as something to help us paint straight edges to something that can be used much more directly to make the artwork.

Alex Menocal 

Bernardino Rakos

Bernardino Rakos creates domestic interiors out of tape.  All the furniture reduced to flat signs. 
However making wall drawings with masking tape only touches the surface of how we can think about tape as a medium to work with. If we begin to think about the material properties of tape we can begin to tap into ideas that could be developed in relation to its 'ur' history (using the Benjamin term) as well as open out ideas associated with each tape's actual use and the ways in which these uses could be subverted or revealed as part of the way we could ‘read’ or ‘engage’ with drawings made from tape.

Below is a list of tapes, some I have simply defined by their physical makeup, others by their function. As you will quickly see a rich contextual playing field opens out as soon as you do some basic research. . 

Barbed tape: Barbed tape is characterized by the shape of the barbs: typically short barb barbed tape has barbs from 10 mm to 15 mm long, medium barb tape has barbs 20 mm to 25 mm long, and long barb tape has barbs from 60 to 66 mm long. It was first of all used to keep people in places such as mental asylums, now often used by gated communities to keep people out. 

Barricade tape: Brightly coloured tape (often incorporating a two-tone pattern of alternating yellow-black or red-white stripes or the words "Caution" or "Danger" in prominent lettering) that is used to warn or catch the attention of passersby of an area or situation containing a possible hazard.

Binding tape: Linen binding tape for handmade book manufacture. 

Bondage tape: A strip of thin plastic material, often made of latex,  that adheres only to itself, without any adhesive; it is typically intended to be used in erotic bondage as it does not stick to the hair or skin.

Book repair tape: A linen tape, using a natural adhesive with low PH designed for archival purposes.

Cable path tape: This has adhesive that runs only along its edges, similar to gaffer tape, it's designed to route cables across rooms, its adhesive-free center sits over the cables, so they can move whilst still being safely attached to the floor.

Copper tape: Some copper tapes are used as slug or snail barriers, because their mucus has an adverse reaction to copper. Copper foil tape is used in stained glass manufacture.

Double sided tape: This tape has adhesive on both sides, and is used to stick two surfaces together.

Duct tape: a composite make-up of woven cotton cloth that's been backed with polyethylene, and then coated with a high-tack adhesive.

Elastic therapeutic tape: A sports injury tape that now comes in a wide variety of colours. 

Electrical tape: Made of PVC vinyl, and is backed with a pressure sensitive rubber-type adhesive. Comes in a variety of colours (black, red, green, yellow, green, and white) that can be used for colour-coding.

Fibreglass tape: Made up of a fiberglass mesh/aluminum foil composite, and backed with a strong, durable adhesive. Usually has a shiny silver surface.

Filament tape: A pressure sensitive adhesive, coated onto a backing material of polypropylene or polyester film with fibreglass filaments embedded within it for high tensile strength.

Fire tape: Used to close the seams between drywall panels with a fire-stopping joint; Fire Tape is rated for 1 and 2 hours of fire protection.

Floor marking tape: PVC film-based tape contains a solvent or acrylic adhesive, used for marking of areas on a floor.

Friction tape: Made to wrap around things such as tennis racquet handles. A tape made of cloth which has been impregnated with a rubber-based adhesive.

Gaffer tape: Originally developed for the entertainment industry, this flexible matte-finish tape is ideal for holding down cables and marking positions, and its matte finish won't create an annoying glare by reflecting stage or set lighting.

Gecko tape: A tape surface covered with nanoscopic hairs intended to maximize surface area.

Gorilla tape: A heavy duty duct tape.

Gum tape: Brown paper gum strip is used by artists to stretch watercolour paper. Water activated tapes are also used for closing and sealing boxes.

Heat shrink tape: Heat shrink is a polyolefin sleeving that contracts when heated, conforming to whatever surface it's wrapped around.

Hockey tape: You can get both stick tape and shin tape. These come in a wide variety of colours, shin tape being elasticated and new stick tapes are now rubberised.

Lingerie tape: Used to secure bra straps and stop them from slipping, similar to wig tape which is used to stop toupees slipping.

Magic tape: It appears frosty on the roll, yet is invisible on paper. Easy to write on and therefore often used for wrapping presents.

Masking tape: The adhesive is the key element to its usefulness, as it allows the tape to be easily removed without leaving residue or damaging the surface to which it is applied. The tape is available in several strengths, rated on a 1–100 scale based on the strength of the adhesive. Most painting operations will require a tape in the 50 range. Household masking tape is made of an even weaker paper and lower-grade adhesive.

Paper repair tape: Comes as a very thin tissue, this is almost invisible when burnished.

Parcel tape: Also called box sealing tape: This usually brown tape has also been used by artists as a way to create molds of objects as well as to create a brand.  See Mark Jenkins’ and Thomas Hirschhorn’s work. (It's interesting to note that the article on Hirschorn mentions his signature style as using 'duct-tape' but its actually 'parcel tape', poor research on the part of the writer.

Police tape: Used by police forces to mark out a crime or accident area. 

Road marking tape: Preformed polymer tapes that can be applied permanently or temporary to the pavements to create road markings.

Sellotape: A British brand name, a general-purpose clear home and office tape. The name is often used as a generic term for this type of tape in the UK.

Spike tape:  Specifically for placing spikes. I.e. places where actors need to be when acting on stage or for a film. When used to indicate locations under dark conditions florescent spike tapes are used.

Silicone tape: Made out of a single self-fusing compound that bonds to itself. Used to provide waterproof seals and electrical insulation in wrap-style applications on cables, hoses, and electrical components. During application, it's simply stretched and wrapped (with slight overlapping) to create a seal, and after a curing period (usually 24 hours), the silicone forms an unbreakable bond.

Steri-strip medical tape:  These tapes used to be called butterfly stitches. A butterfly closure is one that can be done without stitches. Usually used to close small cuts in sensitive areas of the body.

Velcro tape: Consists of two components: a lineal fabric strip with tiny hooks that can "mate" with another fabric strip with smaller loops, attaching temporarily, until pulled apart.

Washi tape: Japanese self adhesive decorative tapes now widely available in card shops and other commercial outlets. Historically ‘Washi’ is the term used for hand made Japanese papers, these tapes are semi-transparent and I think it’s this quality that leads them to be called ‘washi’.

You could now go on to research who made the ingredients that make up the adhesives for these tapes, what are their working conditions like? How is PVC vinyl made? Who extracts the raw materials for these products out of the ground? Does their manufacture cause environmental damage? There will be environmental, political and sociological factors involved in adhesive tape production and above all individual human beings have been involved in every stage of their production and distribution.

However as an artist you don’t have to take these things into account, you might begin by simply turning a tape around in your hands and thinking about what you could do with it. Even the fact that tape creates layers as it is wound around the central spool can be used. 

Topographical maps carved from electrical tape: Takahiro Iwasaki.

Wes Naman and Douglas Gordon have both used sellotape to distort faces. You might want to look at how different tapes could be used to create a dialogue with the body, think of how many scenes from films involve people and tape. 

Douglas Gordon: Monster

Wes Naman

Sports injury tape

These body parts with applied sports injury tape begin to open out a fascinating dialogue between the diagram, abstraction and fashion. The important issue is as always looking for the potential in any medium to carry ideas. In this case the humble tape has become something wonderful, a material that has a powerful signifying power and one that is woven deeply into our contemporary life. 

What is the relationship between the black bar of censorship and the black tape of the terrorist who tapes his victim’s mouths shut? To tape your mouth shut is to stop you acting as a human with any agency. We use tape both physically and metaphorically and as you tear open your Xmas presents this year perhaps you might give some thought to how as an artist you could take that tape and give it a new life within an extended drawing practice.

See also:

Drawing with tape: part two

Lines, warning signs and barriers

Michael Craig Martin

More tape use as art material