Knowing that I am a mosaic assemblage artist, friends often give me with all sorts of unusual objects that they have found for me to use in my art work. It can take a while until these things find their way into an assembled art work but eventually they do. Most recently, as I have begun to make mosaic masks again, I have been rooting through all my bags of materials for just the right articles to apply to these faces. It gives me great pleasure, as a hunter-gatherer artist, to find them again and to use them. My most recent mosaic mask uses the crab claws that my friend Mary found on a Bermuda beach (at least I recall that it was Bermuda - as I'm not certain please don't go running off there in search of exotic crab claws just yet). The black, orange and white claws were quite dramatic so I designed the mosaic mask around them - using black enameling on top of a white glaze and lustre glaze. After using the intact claws I used the fragmented ones on the obverse side of the mask - the controlled chaotic side. On this side I have inserted a glass eye that I made with fused glass into an expired bulb from a slide projector. The small objects which appear like beans are actually polyvinyl resin bits from the now defunct Utica Tool company in Orangeburg. All these things are relics from the past.
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