Tiny rings: I first volunteered to make three rings and Rachel said please do six, so I did and mailed them back to her. Then I said I’d do 10 more, but ended up doing a total of 26 so far! These are 2-inch ceramic rings that will end up being a color study of 700 rings done by mosaic artists from all over the world.
Gears: The New England Mosaic Society is doing a Gears project for the Ruins Project. I have filled 5 small gears with malmischiato and brass, copper and aluminum wire.
This is an antique 8-inch gear that looks like one that could have been part of an industrial loom powered by coal in the 19th century. My grandmother’s father (East Germany 1882) and her husband’s grandfather (Manchester, England 1960) got their start in the US as weavers in the textile mills of Fall River, MA, 1860-1935. My grandmother also was a master weaver in the 1920s-30s in the same mills. My mother became an accomplished handweaver in the 1980s-1990s. I did a fair amount of handweaving, but gave it up for the endless creative opportunities in mosaic. I am creating this mosaic as an homage to my foremothers and fathers, using painted stained glass and a bit of malmischiato in the center) Click on the image above to watch a video created by the Charles River Museum of Technology and Innovation featuring this and other works.
Malmischiato
I learned to hand pulled glass threads called filati to make malmischiato (“badly mixed” in Italian) from Rachel Sager in her on-line videos. I quickly got addicted to the mesmerizing mixing of colors, melting bits with a blowtorch and cutting those threads in little pieces to mosaic with.
Rachel has created The Ruins Project (ruinsproject.com, sagermosaics.com) that has become a mosaic museum in an abandoned coal mine on her property, next to a rail trail and the Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania. Rachel works with mosaic and other artists all over the world to tell the story of coal and its coal miners.