This mosaic was commissioned by the Alexandrina Council in 2008. The project brief required a mosaic based on the theme of water and it had to include the active participation of primary school students (lots of them!).
Primary school students, generally speaking, have difficulty cutting tiles so I designed a mosaic that required no tile cutting. The idea was to convert a photograph of ripples on still water into pixels. Each pixel represents a 20mm x 20mm glass tile. From there I drew a grid of squares on paper and numbered each square from 1 to 5 depending on which colour it was. All the kids had to do was stick the appropriate colour in each numbered square. One group of kids after another were brought into the Goolwa Library to participate and the tiles were all stuck down within a week – which was about how long it took me to number the 14,000 squares! Each panel is about 1m x 3m.
I began work on this project in April 2008 and installed the mosaic in August 2008. By the way, the garden planted in front of the mosaic grew so well that now the mosaic is mostly hidden – visit the Goolwa Library and see if you can find it!
