Clay Diary: Senza Cucitura
Design Technique: Senza Cucitura (Italian phrase, means "without seams") The grout lines in a mosaic are purposely hidden in the design of the mosaic to create a seamless image.
Example: M0000021, Victory
Above there are two images. The first image is a digital picture I took of a memorial statue by Andrzej Pitynski at The National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, New Britain, PA. The second image is a ceramic mosaic "sketch" of the photo. Much like a figure painter making charcoal drawing, I wasn't interested spending a great deal of time capturing the subtle nuances of the image. Rather, the mosaic was an exercise in studying form. Therefore the detail of the face and breast plate were omitted and the surface decoration of the mosaic is flat and monochromatic. I limited myself to blue, white and black underglazes for decorating the piece. All I wanted to show were major shifts in light and color intensity. In the areas where the glaze was applied too thinly, the red clay unintentionally showed through after grouting.
My goal was to break down the image into pieces and hide all of the grout lines. The only obvious grout line in the design is in the sword. When I designed the mosaic in 2002, I was worried that the sword piece would be too long and narrow and might warp or not fit correctly after it was fired. So I broke it on the shadow line. However, now that I am a bit more skilled at making mosaics, I would consider leaving the sword as one piece. This mosaic, "Victory", is made up of 18 separate pieces.
There are false grout lines in the piece. These are lines where a shallow incision was made in the clay body and grout partially filled the cavity. These lines help to create the illusion of charcoal sketch. How quickly can you discern the true grout lines and find all 18 mosaic pieces?
I know it may seem silly to do this exercise but I found it to be a stimulating challenge. It's not quite as easy as you may think. You may ask, "What's the point? Why not just make a large tile and simply paint the picture on the tile?" ... On a small scale like the one above where the mosaic is only 15"x10", it may not make much sense to go through the trouble of creating a mosaic. However, on a much larger scale - let's say for a wall mural 15 feet by 10 feet - the result could be quite splendid. I think it would be fun to trick viewers into thinking they are looking at one piece painting, when in fact, they are viewing a mosaic made up of several hundred individually shaped pieces. This mosaic design counters the traditional notion of a mosaic, whereby, the viewer is forced to visually assemble pieces to create an image. With this technique, the viewer would have to visually disassemble the pieces to see the form.
I intend to further explore this idea of a seamless mosaic which I like to
call senza cucitura .
D. Franchi
September 29, 2003
