Mosaic (or is that kintsugi?)

Pick your own Vocab Word o'th'Week.

This piece is called Redemption, and is one of artist Karen’s altar pieces. I thought this figure looked like me, when I saw her live. I should look again at the website and see if I can purchase it. If you’re in the Boulder/Denver area, you can see the work of Casa de Juste in a few Mexican restaurants around town. You can see why.

This article contains some SPOILERS for the resolution at the end of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. So. Yanno. Be warned.

…

“Mosaic is an old and slow process of associations. Not a puzzle so much as a discipline of setting in beauty what might otherwise be discarded.” ~Casa de Yuste

Open Studios is a yearly thing that happens every Fall in Boulder, Colorado, where I grew up and used to live up till the plague hit hard. It’s an event that spans a week, and during this week, artists of many media (though mostly visual artists) open up their studios and workshops for strolling onlookers to come look at their process, chat with the artists, and maybe purchase a finished piece. I last went to this event in 2019, when I was still mostly living in a tiny apartment, post-divorce, in the grungy college rathole neighborhood of Boulder. My parents (especially my mom) were big fans of Open Studios and would get their maps out, plot an afternoon outing, and see which pubs would be nearest which cluster of artist studios. 

It was October of 2019, then, that I accompanied my parents to their last stop on their Open Studios tour that year since that studio was very near my corner bar and my apartment. This studio featured these amazing smashed-china mosaic altars of a woman who reminded me eerily of the footage artist at the end of William Gibson’s book Pattern Recognition. The secretive artist in the book has shrapnel lodged in her head that renders her unable to communicate except through film snippets, which she attaches together into patterns. The artist in reality was elderly, vibrant, social, and witty; except she slanted and slurred in evidence of what seemed to me like a stroke (I didn’t ask, obviously). But it hit me, the similarities, like a fine china plate to the face.

I had involuntarily stayed up till past midnight reading the last half of the Gibson book, having been even more under the spell of suspense than normal by my book club meeting with Friend Harold—he and I are a two-person reading group, our selections almost entirely in the cyberpunk genre. I hadn’t read any Gibson besides Neuromancer a long time ago. I pretty much literally couldn’t put Pattern Recognition down. The fact that the film-clip woman in the book made her art through her brain damage and so did the woman in reality the next day, was astonishing. And both, it can be argued, work in mosaics: the one in film clips, the other in physical shards (kind of like the one lodged in the book-artist’s brain)….

The artist in real life is named Karen, and here’s her bit about what mosaic means, a fragment (!) yoinked from her artist statement:

”Mosaic is an old and slow process of associations. Not a puzzle so much as a discipline of setting in beauty what might otherwise be discarded. Mosaic is also a reference to the writings of Moses. I’ve been asked what’s a nice Jewish girl like me doing in a place like this? Breaking plates.”

Now of course if you’re anything like me, you’ve noticed this passing reference to Moses here in her description, dropped like a teacup into the middle of the rhapsody. So: me being the amateur linguistics nerd that I am, leapt straight to Google.

Disappointingly, the reference to Moses is just a translation coincidence—the “Mosaic studies” of biblical lore have nothing to do with the etymology of “mosaic” to mean an art form of arranged broken pieces of a hard material. To quote Otto of A Fish Called Wanda, every Gen Xer’s favorite villain: “DisaPPOINTed!” Though I guess the inclusion of that unrelated fact here is sort of mosaic-like in and of itself, isn’t it…

I’ve written before, too, about the ancient Japanese practice of kintsugi, which is an art form of patchworking ceramics, but in a different way than mosaic. You might have heard of it, actually—it got to be a wistful and widespread trend in the US starting in the lockdowniest parts of 2020: Instead of trying to hide the cracks and gaps in a broken piece of pottery, they’re fixed and filled with gold, thus emphasizing the flaws and making the piece more valuable and more beautiful than it was when it was unbroken. If you think about it, kintsugi is more like a cover in, say, rock music, and a mosaic is more like a sample in a hip-hop remix. A broken piece of china treated with kintsugi is broken and then put back together into the same shape it was before. Mosaic takes that shattered crockery and reshapes it, remakes it into something completely different. 

I often describe my own way of writing and teaching as “bird-nesting” (gathering bits and sticks and fluff from other things and forming them into my own curriculum), but I wonder if I shouldn’t be referring to it more as mosaic. Putting little broken pieces, not back together, but together in a new way. Artist Karen takes broken plates and from them makes altars, skulls, and wry pokes at political figures. 

CODA: Karen was chatting with us at the end of our visit, mentioning that she had a set of her grandmother’s china and she wasn’t sure what to do with it, how to treat it in the best way. My mom suggested that she host a dinner party served on her grandmother’s china, and after eating have each guest wash and smash their own plates, for use in her mosaics from there. Oh, exclaimed all of us, Karen included: what a wonderful idea! And then Dad told me later, in private, of his worries about my mom’s and his aging mindbodies, fragile and fragmenting with surgeries and age, waiting to break into unusable smithereens. This was back in 2019, and those things have gotten only a little more broken since then, not fatally so at least. But then other things have been rearranged and glued together, too, like me into my partner’s family. So what happens if you insert a piece of kintsugi into a mosaic?

…

I will leave you with Karen’s website, Casa de Yuste, along with a recommendation to read Pattern Recognition. Happy New Year. May you form your little broken bits into something new and beautiful in 2023.