Making the Zoo mosaic, with the wall onto which mosaic is being installed behind the artists
There’s no better day than an English summer, when the sun is shining, the clouds are fleeting, the birdsong is carolling, the fragrance of food cooked with love wafts our way and we are making something beautiful that will last at least two hundred years.
Over the summer from the middle of July until September 4th, every weekday, we are making the Zoo mosaic, to decorate our wall outside the front of London School of Mosaic. This project was made possible by funding from the Arts Council England’s Covid Emergency grant, enabling us to run sessions for local residents including many families (e.g. Ludham and Waxham estate) and create opportunities for our freelance tutors.
The spark for our mosaic came from Henri Rousseau’s Tiger in a Tropical Storm, exhibited in the National Gallery. My own jungle story is that I went to Chefoo school in a Malaysian mountain jungle in the 1960’s, where you had to shut the bedroom door at night in case the tiger paid a visit. The teachers at the school generally were fearful of the jungle, but the kids loved it. Once I ran away with a group of kids, because of the oppressive behaviour of teachers, but we didn’t get far. The jungle was dense and we lost our way. I think in our escapade we saw a tiger – and froze. We were scared and found a stream and followed it and eventually made our way back to the dreaded school. Today, I understand the jungle is being encroached on by expanding towns and villages, with people setting up new homes and businesses along roadways, although the high mountains remain a sanctuary where tigers still roam.
The Zoo mosaic has evolved into a notional five hundred animals, bugs, butterflies and birds which we expect about 500 people to help us make. It may take one or two years or even longer to complete. There is a lot of space to fill. Our workshop leaders set up for an 11am start and help teach, design, make and install until 4pm. The sessions are free for children and adults from our estate, and visitors are welcome to join in, encouraged to make a £10 donation. There is a maximum of twelve people at one time, but I’m sure I’ve seen sixteen sitting outside laying their tiles (remember social distancing please). Participants will learn the basic skills of mosaic making for an external installation and be involved in every stage of the process. Over one hundred installations have been put up so far: rhino, tiger, toucan, fox, flamingo among many others including leaves and a few trees and other creatures. The mosaic is iconic, rather than realistic, but we do want a likeness and most of the naïve work is being placed in the corner nearest to the school. Whatever goes up has to be of good technical standard, as this is our face to the world.
I remember Picasso’s phrase – that he was born with the gifts of Raphael and Rembrandt, but spent much of his life as an artist trying to paint like a child. Mosaic has a particularly top flight history, the earliest ones decorating the temple of Inanna in the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk. The ancient North Africans, Greeks and Romans used mosaic mostly in pavements and on floors, often to show-off their wealth and learning. They installed a wide variety of subjects, including many gods, natural images as well as patterns. During the Byzantine era, mosaic depicted a new cosmology of the world, the spread of belief in one God centring on key figures in the biblical tradition as well as the introduction of later saints and martyrs. In Islam, mosaic was widely used to cover domes and write texts from the Koran into the surface of mosques. Then the most religious of mosaicists – Antoni Gaudi – liberated mosaic from its religious gravitas and took it into Park Guell in Barcelona, where he taught us to use colour, form, humour and expression to uplift the surface of our public spaces.
So now we are free to make mosaic wherever we want. The Zoo mosaic reminds us that humans are the ones in a cage – the incarceration of our own imagination – as we have sought to control nature and privatise earth, losing touch with our sharing and inclusive role as one small part of creation. The notion of Homo Deus is perhaps better seen as Homo Vacuous (at the moment), and the animals and plants we make in our mosaic remind us to play our part, rather than seek to dominate. How can we teach ourselves to be free? Perhaps by learning to love what we do: try making some mosaic, it makes you feel good.