The Art of Mosaic Design

Ellen Blakeley makes urban mosaics using the grit of city life. Forget marble, gemstones, gold and silver smalti, and even ceramics. This San Francisco artist's preferred medium is shattered safety glass salvaged from vandalized bus shelters and store windows. These found raw materials give Blakeley's mosaics a street-smart sensibility.

Blakeley's artistic career has evolved from printmaking and painting to ceramic sculptures and vessels to her current foray into glass mosaics. She studied ceramics under Ron Nagle at Mills College in Oakland, California, for four years, then opened a small tile design business that she ran from 1985 to 1992. Blakeley developed her special glass mosaic technique in 1993. Since then, as she says, "I am glassing the world, one shard at a time." From garden sculptures to bathroom floors, from picture frames and tabletops to chandeliers in grand hotels, her line is distributed in showrooms throughout the United States and in Canada.

Referring to her work as "recycled vandalism," the artist gives glass shards center stage in her projects. She discovered her inventive shattered glass technique about five years ago, treating broken tempered glass as her tesserae. Rather than obliterating the surface below, the glass opens it up as another dimension within each artwork where colors and patterns sparkle.

Fragments are the basic mosaic building blocks, but they also act as unobstrusive lenses to view collage images that lie beneath them. Bits of patterned paper, colored foil, drawings, photographs, and printed text are used to create different effects. Because thick pieces of glass often contain webs of internal fractures, the compositions have extraordinary refractive qualities. "The information that goes under the glass, along with the pureness of the glass itself, keeps me endlessly intrigued with the play between surface and depth," she says.

-1998 "Art of Mosaic Design"