NEMS NEWS February 2025

Bound is my reaction to the overturning of Roe vs Wade. The suggestion of a woman being stitched closed without any regard for her, while the sparks of gold scattered throughout are small glimmers of hope that things will change.

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Nikki Sullivan Answers the Question: What Mosaic Inspired You and How You Incorporated Some Element of that Design into Your Own Work?

The white mosaic coffee table is one of similar size (5 feet) I made a few years later for a commission.

Nikki Sullivan Mosaics

Deerfield, NH https://www.instagram.com/nikkisullivancreativeart/

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TAKE 5 – ANABELLA WEWER

1.  How did you begin your journey as an artist? When did you realize this was the path you wanted to pursue? 

I am a graphic designer who spent my early years in print advertising, 
eventually transitioning to Web design and apps. Though I grew up making things, I had plenty of work as a young professional with a family. A couple of years into transitioning to designing for the Web, I realized I really missed the tactile aspects of design; I craved the smell of printing presses and picking just the right paper or directing a photographer for a job. Looking at everything on the screen made me realize I missed touching materials, so I started exploring pottery and letterpress printing and picked up photography again. While chaperoning my son’s choir trip to Italy, I happened upon a woman working in micro-mosaics at the Savelli Gallery near the Vatican. I had no idea what I was looking at — I didn’t even know it was called micro-mosaic — but I was mesmerized by the process and the color blending. That discovery, and the lack of time for more than one hobby, made me abandon all the other media and focus on mosaic in all of my spare time. It took a few years of learning and experimenting until I made something that I didn’t think was derivative of any of the instructors I was lucky to learn with and think of myself as an artist beyond being a graphic designer.

2. When I think of Venezuelan art, the first image that comes to mind is a traditional piece with vibrant colors and an entire canvas of images.  The recent retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim shows how the landscape of modern Venezuelan art has changed, becoming more streamlined and muted. Do you draw from either of these influences?

Funny you’d mention that Guggenheim exhibit, as it really made me look at Gego, the featured artist, in a way that I never had.  Trained as an architect, her works are monumental and can be found all over Caracas, where I grew up. (https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/gego-measuring-infinity)  As a teenager, to me they were just part of the landscape, as is the work of Venezuela’s most famous artists, whose work in kinetic art adorns buildings and byways all over the country. That exhibit, and another a year or so earlier at MoMA, where the Cisneros Collection is, made me really homesick, but it also made me embark on a lot of research and think more deeply about the public art that I grew up with. The masterful works Carlos Cruz-Diez, Alejandro Otero, Mercedes Pardó and Jesus Soto, along with Gego’s, adorn the lobbies of buildings and public spaces I frequented. The Universidad Central de Venezuela, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the magnum opus of its architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, is covered in mosaic murals and features sculptures by the likes of Calder. They were all the background of my daily life (I used to go to the University three days a week, while my mom finished her degree, and my dad was a professor there), and I didn’t know it then, but shaping my artistic mind.

I had always thought color was natural to me, and it is, but after I saw the works in the context of museum exhibits, I realized I had been learning about color theory, how colors are made and how they affect each other, simply by growing up around it. I couldn’t have explained where this instinctive understanding of color came from before, but now I think that it was simply observing all these works, even if not technically studying them, daily.

My tendency is towards muted colors and simple lines, so to get back to your question, yes, I think Gego’s work also influenced the way I appreciate art, considering shadows and spacial relationships, and instilling a love for concrete and seeing the beauty in sturdy, industrial structures.

3.  What topics do you explore in your work?

I started to create beautiful objects, explore materiality, and keep my hands connected to tangible things. My driving force is often to capture a moment in time and to discover and provide beauty in unexpected places. However, when getting work together for the Art Complex Museum exhibit, I was invited to participate in 2023 (postponed from 2020), which centered on topics related to the impact of humans on our environment; I realized that a lot of my work is about my observations and concerns about forces, natural and man-made, on the planet. I also found that through art, we can have conversations that would otherwise be really difficult to start when talking to strangers, but it is much easier to talk about climate change with climate deniers when we start by talking about a piece of art I made. That sort of thinking is now more central to the work I am making.

4.  Regarding your SAMA piece, The Long View, could you tell us what the creative process was like and if you experienced any challenges along the way? 

“The Long View,” along with “2°C,” also at the 2024 MAI exhibit, was made for that Art Complex Museum exhibit I mentioned. I have long been concerned about sea creatures being found with bellies full of plastic, so I started keeping the plastic I find, especially on beaches, instead of disposing of it, to address that issue. While researching, I ran across studies about how much microplastics we humans consume, and the piece became more universal.

I didn’t want to feature obvious debris, because the nature of these plastics in our environment is that they break down and become tiny pieces floating about in the oceans and in our food and drinking water, almost unseen and unrecognized. As a process mosaicist, it is the experimenting with materials and the actual making that I am in love with, so I started doing tests using found plastics as my main material. They are all different and in different stages of breakdown, so they all cut differently, and I had to figure out how to cut them into tesserae shapes so they retained their color or how to use the whitish edges that are often present when cutting plastic.

One of my challenges was admittedly self-imposed, but it did delay the completion of the piece by a couple of years. I had collected this bottle of Aussie shampoo, which has a beautiful hue, and I was determined to find glass that matched it. I had decided earlier that the message of plastics invading our environment was going to be represented by smalto standing in for the natural world, and it would be “polluted” by plastic, my lines of glass turning into plastic as I went along, so I needed to transition between the plastic and the glass in gradients as I like to make them. It turns out that the chemicals that make up that magenta color are really unstable, so it is almost impossible to achieve that color with glass. It was a long search and there was even a desperate call on social media that led to many beautiful interactions with mosaic artists all over the world, who sometimes sent me 2 to 3 pieces of smalti they had that were close to that color. In the end, I did use a lot of those bits, but I also had to mix Epoxy Sculpt (ultimately a plastic), to bridge the color gradation. I could have simply skipped that color and made life a lot easier for myself, but I am just that stubborn sometimes and the color was just the right one for that space, so I persevered. I have no problem waiting that long for a piece to be just right for me, and so I gave it the time it needed. No regrets.

The design of that mosaic is really abstract. It could have been anything, but I was simultaneously learning about watercolor painting, and was fascinated by the way colors mix and pool.  Because I didn’t know what I was doing, the paper was wrinkling, so I just used those experiments as the design for the piece. The colors were dictated by the plastics I found.

5.  You are celebrated for your hammer and hardie technique and adherence to classical andamento rules (amongst other things).  How did you come to embrace this method and philosophy?   

I was lucky that my first workshop was taught that way, and then the instructor advised me to study in Italy once I told her what I wanted to do, so it’s been that way since day one. The more I understood andamento, the more it became fundamental to my practice, and eventually, it was a challenge to see if I could achieve certain effects while adhering to the order of lines. It’s part of what makes it fun for me! As for hammer & hardie, it’s just how I learned, but I started analyzing it in an almost scientific way, understanding the physics of cutting and how the energy travels through our bodies, resulting in more or less successful cuts. Again, it’s all about the process! A hammer allows me to make very precise cuts without using as much energy or putting strain on my wrists, and I can cut almost anything with it, so it’s a natural choice for me. I maintain that there is also less material waste when I can make precise cuts.

6.  How do you select your colors, and do you choose them before starting a piece?

The colors are almost always dictated by the story I am trying to tell. Because I conceive my pieces ahead of time, I do choose palettes at the beginning, but I keep it all open to change because of the interactions of color and the effect of the mortar, and even the cuts, on how the color reacts.

“Ebb Tide” – 8” x 8”, 2024, ceramic
                              
7.  What is the best advice you were given that you wish you had known when you started your artistic journey?

The mortar and the interstices are as much part of the mosaic as the material choices and the design.

 8.  What projects are you currently working on? 

I am currently exploring working in a smaller format without reducing the size of the tesserae, partly because of my current chosen lifestyle (we have been largely nomadic for a few years, as we travel and explore the national parks), but also because it sometimes takes me 300-400 hours to create those large works.  I feel like I’d like to finish something in days instead of months or years!

For more information, see:  https://www.anabellawewermosaics.com/work/

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National Gallery of Art Unveils Chagall Mosaic Orphée (1969) in the Sculpture Garden on November 27, 2013,  Reprinted from the Department of Communications, National Gallery of Art

Washington, DC—The National Gallery of Art has unveiled a permanent and public home for one of Washington’s hidden treasures—an exquisite glass and stone mosaic designed by Marc Chagall (1887–1985).

Adorning a garden wall at Evelyn and John Nef’s private residence in Georgetown for nearly four decades, the mosaic was part of Evelyn’s momentous 2009 bequest of some 100 works from the couple’s 19th- and 20th-century collection of prints, drawings, and illustrated books.

“The Gallery is delighted to share Evelyn and John Nef’s most prized possession—exactly as she desired,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “The mosaic is an exceptional gift from an honored friend whose story lives on.”

The mosaic (approximately 10 by 17 feet) was a special gift from Chagall to the Nefs. After visiting the couple’s home at 28th and N Street NW in 1968, the artist declared, “Nothing for the house. The house is perfect as it is. But I will do something for the garden: a mosaic.” Chagall designed the work at his studio in France and hired Italian mosaicist Lino Melano to create it using Murano glass, Carrara marble, and natural colored stones from Italy. Three years later, Melano oversaw its installation into a 30-foot brick wall built for the purpose. The couple celebrated its completion on November 1, 1971, with the 84-year-old Chagall present. It was one of the first large-scale outdoor Chagall mosaics to be installed in this country, and was soon followed by another, the now-renowned Four Seasons mosaic in Chicago.

Comprising ten individually fashioned panels, each measuring approximately 5 by 3 1/2 feet and mounted on concrete, the mosaic presents colorful figures from Greek mythology—Orpheus with his lute, the Three Graces, and the winged horse Pegasus.

In the bottom left corner of the mosaic, a group of people wait to cross a large body of water. According to Chagall, this scene alludes to the immigrants and refugees who undertook ocean journeys to America. The scene is also a reference to his own past: smuggled out of Nazi-occupied France by the International Rescue Committee during World War II, the Jewish artist found safe haven in New York. At lower right, the artist included a pair of lovers beneath a tree. When Evelyn inquired if the couple was a depiction of her and John, Chagall said, “If you like.”

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