All posts tagged: Community mosaic making

This little town of mine let it shine

Published by gertrud

…. this verse slightly altered from a song I once sang with my choir comes to my mind being around Kathleen Crocetti and her mosaic projects in Watsonville. Her dream is to make Watsonville the Barcelona of California together with the young community of the 50.000 inhabitants of a small agriculture town situated in the fertile back garden of Monterey Bay/California. A lot of nutrition is produced and exported here on large farms with immigrants hands. Strawberries, lettuce, artichokes, apples you name it have been tended to since over 100 years by many groups of immigrant workers. Some stayed. At the moment 85% of Watsonville’s population is of Mexican heritage. Still the average income here is a quarter less than that of near by Santa Cruz/CA. The difference in between pitoresque coast dwellings like Monterey or Carmel and Watsonville is striking on first sight. In the coast cities individual wealth designs beautiful cost homes and inviting shop fronts and brings in enough tax money to make sturdy wooden public walkways with views of the beautiful …

Mosaic for Awareness Raising on Climate Change Beijing

Published by gertrud

Between November 21 and April 22 a Climate Change Community Mosaic was created in Beijing. It was  a wonderful project that kept us busy and active for this good course – awareness raising about climate change. The whole project started with a tweet by the GLOBAL ASSEMBLY that wants to involve people’s direct voices in the COP discussions – compared to representatives voices as it is until now- and inspire and enable ordinary citizens to discuss climate change policies amongst themselves. One medium of this discussion shall be art. Together with 3 other women we organized our own “Global Assembly” of the international community of Beijing and out of the discussion on that day December 8, 2021 the Climate Change Community Mosaic was created. It was absolutely overwhelming to have soo many people interested to participate to make the mosaic with their own hands, to search for an appropriate location and to give general support in translating between Chinese and English, writing content, creating publications, installing and hosting the inauguration. It’s almost impossible to describe the …

Starting to work in Beijing

Published by gertrud

This air vent structure is standing around in a beautiful spot under big plantain trees in our compound in Beijing. When I saw it I thought it would give a good object to decorate with mosaic. The management of the compound agreed and I set of to start to draw it, take measurements etc. My newly found old friend Sanny Wroblewski (whom I met already 5 years ago when we were posted in Turkey) joined me with her graphic design skills to turn the ugly cement blog into a dragon. The compound is named – Julong Hua Yuan – which means all dragons garden. One day we set off to get dragon- inspired. That was fun. Now the work begins: finding tiles and cement, fibre netting and transparent adhesive, getting the tools and the production process ready. The idea is to involve the community of the compound. The tricky point is: its all in Chinese. Today with the help of my housekeeper Xu I talked to a tile selling company. It works like this: I …