Pique assiette.

After I put all the lovely  blue willow up on the open shelves in my kitchen, I decided I had to have something different to go above the sink between the shelves.

In the past have broken many of my blue willow dishes but I saved everyone of them, so, remembering I had a giant tub full of  years of this accumulated clumsiness in the studio, I decided to make a mixed media mosaic, a combination mirror and shrine to honor all the blue willow I’ve dropped and to my number one Goddess Quan Yin, a Buddhist Bodhisattva of Compassion known as “She Who Hears The Cries Of The World”.

Mixed media mosaic is also known as pique assiette.   It is the technique of collecting, glueing or mortaring and grouting just about everything, including the kitchen sink, onto just about anything, including the kitchen sink.

Raymond Edouard Isadore of Chartres born in 1900, was an amazingly obsessed Frenchman, who began collecting and covering everything, and I mean everything, around his home in broken bits of pottery, china and glass in 1938 and is now known as the father of pique assiette. At the time he was known as the “plate stealer”.

This really is the perfect medium for a clumsy  semi-hoarder.  I do believe a new bouncing baby obsession and art form was just given birth to. If you have any broken bits and pieces of any kind and would like to feed the baby, please send them my way.

Here’s my finished mirror shrine-

And here are some details (some were taken before the final cleaning so please ignore the little bits of sand from the grout)-

And  just in case you were worried, none of my friend Fern’s beautiful Wedgwood Blue Willow was harmed  in the making of this piece.