HANDMADE HISTORIES

Craft inspiration – and a bit about where it came from

MOSAIC

Back in 2017, group of archaeologists and volunteers were just days away from the end of a three-year dig near Boxford in Berkshire. Funds had all but dried up when, at the eleventh hour, they struck gold. Or, more specifically, mosaic. They had in fact stumbled upon a huge 1,600-year-old Roman mosaic floor, beautifully preserved and laid hidden since the end of the fourth century. It depicted the Greek hero Bellerophon astride his winged horse Pegasus, along with Cupid, and the Chimera, a fire-breathing beast.

It was an extraordinary find but the floors of many a well-to-do Roman building were richly adorned with mosaics. While some of the more extravagant would have been commissioned from scratch, mosaics during the Roman period were so popular that homeowners could pick a design ‘off the shelf’ and have it created in situ. Having said that, when the Romans splashed out on a mosaic, they really splashed out. The Alexander Mosaic, uncovered in Pompeii, for example, consists

of approximately 1.5 million individual tiles.

It’s difficult to know when the first mosaic was created. Mosaics can be made using any number of small materials: pebbles, shells, stones, clay, glass and glazed tiles. Some of the earliest datable mosaics come from the Eanna Temple in Uruk (now Southern Iraq), and cover the 500-year-old walls with cones of coloured clay and stone pushed into wet plaster.

With any craft, there are always new interpretations of an ancient technique. New York artist Jason Middlebrook describes mosaic as a “skin for sculpture”, creating extraordinary 3D Gaudí-esque pieces, while Chicago’s Jim Bachor explores materials beyond the traditional. One of his pieces ‘Soup Can’, incorporated Campbell’s tomato soup into his mortar.