Once There Were Elephants
Estimated time to read - around 3 minutes
The story behind the mosaic…
A few years ago I made a mosaic a little bit different from my regular, more abstract work. Once There Were Elephants was displayed in York and London in exhibitions hosted by the British Association for Modern Mosaic. It elicited several questions about how it was made. So today I’m sharing a bit more detail about the process.
The idea for this piece came from another mosaic I had made a couple of years previously, which was in turn inspired by a rhino, more specifically, the decline in their population numbers. For my son’s first Christmas we had adopted a rhino through the World Wildlife Fund and on reading one of the updates on their conservation programmes, I wanted to make something that would highlight the threats that the population faces. You can see the mosaic I made in the image below.
Since making this mosaic, my skills and techniques have developed and wanted to revisit this idea using a different animal. I was spurred on to do so by the publication of the ‘Our Living Planet’ report published by the WWF in 2018, which highlighted serious concerns about declining wildlife populations.
After choosing the subject of an elephant, which had an easily identifiable outline, the first step was to make the substrate. Today we learn about many of the creatures that have gone extinct, by reading about them in books, so I decided the substrate should convey the impression of a page from an old book from the past.
I made an undulating substrate from fibreglass mesh and tile adhesive, and put a couple of cuts into the edges to suggest torn paper. Then I was ready to get making! The plan was that the central elephant would merely be an impression - something that used to be there but was no longer. In order to do this I planned to make a mosaic, and then take all the pieces out before the adhesive had dried.
I drew the outline onto the substrate and started to mosaic one of the ears. I used foraged stone, cut up with the hammer and hardie. Knowing that I was going to be ripping it out allowed me to work less precisely than normal, but it still took me a while.
I let the adhesive start to cure for an hour or so, then took my tweezers and started taking out all the stone. I tried to ensure the stones left individual impressions so you could still tell it there had been a mosaic there.
After doing the first ear I was left with a black mess on my substrate and I did question whether what I was doing was a good idea, but I persevered. I continued with the rest of the elephant, working in stages. As I progressed I found myself leaving larger gaps between the tesserae as this seemed to make it easier to remove them and still leave a good impression in the adhesive. Below you can see the before and after photos of the first ear
Finally, once the elephant was complete, I began to work on the background. This was designed to represent the threat that habitat loss poses to elephants. As human populations increase, so does their demand on land, leading to the loss and fragmentation of land where elephants roam. The green and brown smalti used in the background were chosen as echoes of the forests and grasslands that elephants usually inhabit. The slate rods were laid on edge, with the occasional piece laid flat to symbolise the fragmentation of the elephant’s habitat.
As I made progress on the background, it was a relief that the impression of the elephant started to appear more strongly, and looked less like a mess of used tile adhesive!
Overall I was happy with how this piece turned out. The only thing I would change if I did it again, would be to perhaps leave a few pieces of the original mosaic in. There are a couple small pieces of stone that I couldn’t remove easily, but perhaps leaving a few more could symbolise hope for the elephants, a recognition of the fact that there are still populations in the wild.
On reflection, it’s also possible there may have been an easier and less time consuming way to create an impression of a mosaic than the method I chose. However, this piece was meant to be symbolic of man’s destruction of something precious. To effectively destroy a mosaic that I had spend many hours building felt an appropriate process to convey this message.
This blog post was adapted from an article I wrote for Grout Magazine, published by the British Association for Modern Mosaic. If you have enjoyed reading it and would like to receive similar posts direct to your inbox, you can subscribe to my mailing list using the form at the bottom of the page.