I design and make mosaics that are closer to nature, that bring nature into your home. I use lapidary tools to cut and shape rough and raw rocks, but I don't eliminate the roughness, I don't polish it out. My mosaics are, in a way, living, since there are parts of them that may change.The copper, or the rocks that have copper in them, like chrysocolla and malachite, may oxidize. The mica and some of the more fragile rocks may crumble, which means that the mosaics will not stay exactly the same.
Me working at my lapidary ' Diamond wet saw. I've since added a hat to my gear. Some stones throw sharp chips.
(Image by Rob Kall) Details DMCA
Indigenous wisdom teaches us to stay closer to nature, to pay attention to nature.
Before civilization, people lived closer to nature, including closer to rocks, sometimes even living in caves. Now our spaces are sterile. For hundreds of years people lived in stone buildings and churches were made of stone. But now many millions of people live in high-rises devoid of stone. Where they live in developments where all the stone is cleared out and the only Stone that's there is shell that is brought in by the thousands of tons from quarries. But the mineral world, where are predecessors lived very close, was full of all kinds of different minerals... sedimentary, metamorphic.... Today, outside of an occasional landscape rock or aquarium stones, most people do not live in the presence of rocks.
My mosaics offer a way to bring the variety, the roughness , the shaping caused by hundreds of millions of years of weather and erosion, to be a part of your life. I also include hundreds of millions of years old fossils and minerals that have chatoyant properties, meaning they have flashes of color, sparkle, or glow. These are normal parts of nature, and it's nice to have them in your life to remind you what could be.
Long before I started making mosaics, one of my favorite quotations, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, has been,
"A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special Talent, and the mastery of Successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practiced."
That "Labrador spar" he refers to is Labradorite, one of my favorite minerals, which I use in most of my mosaics to bring in brilliant colors. Owning and regularly looking at labradorite from the different angles needed to see the "deep and beautiful colors" has led me to see the world differently, to look for and see possibilities, to recognize strengths and beauties that I have not seen before.
Observers often see multiple images in my mosaics. . They may see a face, an insect, a microorganism, an amphora, or simply an abstract piece of art.
This is my first attempt at making transparent and translucent mosaics that are backlit.
(Image by Rob Kall) Details DMCA
My process:
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