As we drink a lot of tea in my studio, I thought of a design around that life saving warming and hydrating elixier as my own project. I see it important to always have my own mosaic project ongoing to practice my skills and test new materials, tools and techniques.
8 years ago I designed, produced and laid a 4m2 floor mosaic in our vacation home in Ayvalik on the North Aegean coast. This work and my involvement with it brought me into contact with Turkish artists who taught me a lot and, from whom I learned how to work with natural stone and roman cement. My first teacher was Mustafa Salih Kamanlioglu. He runs a mosaic studio in Ankara. He taught me how to break natural stone into small pieces for mosaic (tesserae). My second master was Nusret Özdemir. He lives in Gaziantep, in the south east of Turkey and taught me how to assess field stones for mosaic suitability. I also learned from him how to break a tessera into a small tooth so that they can be placed closer together. A third teacher was Hande Kökten, who was the director of Ankara University’s School of Restoration Technicians at the time. Despite my limited Turkish, she admitted me to her lessons on the conversation of ancient mosaics. There I mainly learned how to …
I’m am super happy that 5 mosaic projects were realized during the summer in the studio. The first project: two door signs for my apartment and studio in Berlin. I opted for natural stone as material. The stairwell in Berlin, where my studio is located, has a marble floor, which I repeat with similar material in the background of the door signs. The letters are made of dark green granite. I design the cartoons myself and have fun drawing them by hand. I value the time I can be together with other people in the studio. Sabine made this mosaic for herself in 4 sessions. I am happy we spent a relaxed but creative time together. Finally I bought a flex and tried it cutting large tile to size.
