Rupture
2016
30 x 20 inches
Smalto, fused glass on ceramic on framed wedi panel

Rupture was a breakthrough for me. I had gone to school to learn how to make mosaics largely out of curiosity for the technique, not because I felt I had much to say artistically. For the first 2 years the curriculum consists of exercises in different mosaic styles, so I wasn’t really called upon to have any sort of artistic voice. When, in my third and final year of school, the assignments became more open-ended, I was struggling to come up with anything that felt meaningful.
In my personal life at that point I was doing well, I thought, until a series of events with my family and relationship at the time caused me to very suddenly become extremely depressed. I was so struck by how I could feel totally fine one day, and literally overnight become so miserable. This was my inspiration for Rupture; I wanted to communicate that feeling of helplessness and shock. The process of creating this piece was LONG. I chose a very time-intensive process, against the recommendation of my mosaic master, which involved creating each scale out of clay and then melting smalto onto it to create the green-black gradient. At the bottom the scales are uniform and semi-circle, and higher up they start to break and become sharper until in the very top right corner there are only very sharp shards of black glass. I wanted to make something that was as dangerous as everything I was feeling - and it is! It is really easy to cut a finger on this one if you aren’t careful.
I was dragging myself to school every day just to work on this; for most of it I was just sitting down by the kiln alone listening to audiobooks, or crying as I worked on it in class (I remember one embarrassing time when a guest came into the class to tour while I was having one such day, and they asked someone if I was okay, to which one of my classmates responded “Oh yeah, she just does that.”). All that to say, this mosaic didn’t magically save me or anything - it took me months after completing it to start to feel like myself again - but I was passionate enough about finishing it to keep going to school when I didn’t care about anything else, and after Rupture I have had no trouble coming up with concepts for my art that mean a lot to me.