The Grizedale Mosaic

In September 1992 Rosalind Wates was awarded an artist in residency by The Grizedale Society. The brief was to create a mosaic using natural stone gathered from the locality. Rosalind Wates was brought up in the Lake District. After completing a foundation course at Carlisle College of Art and Design, she trained in the decorative arts at The City and Guilds of London Art School and has since specialised in mosaic.

In the landscape, of the landscape, about the landscape. This is the theme of the recently completed Grizedale Mosaic,which lies part way up the east side of the Grizedale Valley. The slowly evolving art of mosaic stretches back thousands of years.

The ancient Greeks created patterned pavements from coloured pebbles, but perhaps our most familiar association with mosaic comes from the Romans. As a decorative means of expression it exploded throughout the Roman Empire. Today these mosaics can tell us about their lifestyles, their gods, what they wore and ate, how they entertained, and even what they threw away. They combined marble, coloured glass, local stone, and broken shards. Later, in the second great flowering of mosaic, the Christians of the Byzantine Empire invented ‘smalti’, brightly coloured glass pieces still used in mosaic today. With these and much use of gold and silver they paid homage to their religion by covering the interiors of churches with biblical scenes. Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, intricately-shaped ceramic tiles made symbolic non-representational mosaics that were used as aids to meditation. In the twentieth century artists began to experiment with mosaic; among them, Gustav Klimt and Antonio Gaudi.

The Grizedale Mosaic is an attempt at further exploration of the medium. My past mosaics have been constructed from man-made vitreous and ceramic pieces, but the Grizedale Society which commissioned this work courageously gave me the opportunity to investigate the use of natural, local materials.

With the onset of autumn the adventure began. The mosaic forms a circle twenty feet in diameter. On three sides the open ground drops away, giving spectacular views up and down the valley,while on the fourth the forest stretches up the hillside. Once the eight - inch deep concrete foundation had been laid, l started to drive around the local slate quarries in search of materials. l wanted to make the mosaic with off-cuts from the quarry waste heaps and I had a glorious time creating my ‘palette’ from what I found. lt is a wonderful thing to find yourself half way up Coniston Old Man as the sun rises, a sack over one shoulder, picking around the foot of some vast quarry in search of ‘badger’ grey or dark Coniston green pieces. Sometimes there was snow, which was awkward when hunting for pieces of quartz! The quarry owners were without exception helpful, and one of them taught me how to split slate.

The greatest surprise of the project lay in the variety of colours that came out of the Lake District hills. I had expected to find dark green, light green, and varying shades of grey - a meagre palette compared to the marble riches of Italy. I was unprepared to find bright orange (refuse from copper mines), yellow, a whole range of reddish-browns, and most astonishing of all (especially when placed next to the green slate) some fragments of a rich maroon slate. The latter, it emerged, were brought from the quarries of Wales to be cut in the Lake District. The lure of gold had to be resisted in the form of iron pyrites, glinting among the rocks.

The mosaic has an unashamedly environmental theme. Five indigenous mammals frozen mid-movement and turned to stone follow each other around the central sun. Balancing this fiery heart is another element essential to life: a river motif, which forms a border to the mosaic. The arrangement of this ‘circus’ owes much to the Romans who discovered many of the best solutions to the problem of dividing and using space on floor areas. They, too, used animals as subjects for their art; sometimes domestic, sometimes wild, and sometimes strange, barely discovered creatures from the far-flung corners of their empire. The sense of discovery in their world is replaced in ours by a sense of loss. As we destroy our landscape and the creatures that live in it, so we are beginning to value them in an entirely new way. We are learning to hold dear the natural - or even unnatural - woodland, the unpolluted streams, and the ever more elusive otter, deer, fox, hare, and badger featured in the Grizedale Mosaic.

The pieces were set in a bed of mortar two inches thick. To enable me to reproduce the design accurately I invented a technique using two inch thick polystyrene cut-outs of the principle motifs. Having laid them in place upon the foundation, I filled them with mortar and they formed an accurate guide for laying the mosaic. When the mortar had set, the polystyrene was broken off and the surrounding area filled. Where possible I used slate pieces as found, but it was necessary to shape many of them. For the smaller cut pieces I used a hammer and hardie (a chisel set in a solid base), a traditional technique used by mosaicists for centuries. The large pieces which form the background were rejected roofing slates. These were shaped with a slater’s knife and bench; a tradition closer to home.

The mosaic was started in late golden summer. It took nearly three months to complete. Through the succeeding very wet autumn my assistant and I learnt new skills and discovered unforeseen powers of endurance. Many people visited the site, and their interest and enthusiasm spurred us on. Even so, it was well into December when the mosaic was completed. The trees were bare, the robins more aggressive, and meadow had turned to mud.

Many of the sculptures at Grizedale reflect the passing of time, the transience of the seasons. Made from organic materials, they exist for a while, then decay naturally back into the ground; a planned mortality which is an essential part of their concept. The Grizedale Mosaic is different. As the Romans left their mark, so have I left mine: a message to future generations saying that we didn’t just care about wealth, power, and the materialistic things of life; beyond all that, there’s a part of us that is still claimed by the wilderness.

Rosalind Wates Jan ‘93