Week 2

Below are a few pics of the site in progress. Our flowers are installed and artist Jackie Stack Lagakos has been a mosaic machine filling in all of the beautiful blue porcelain tile you see blow.

Porcelain was first made in China
 which explains why porcelain plates (like the ones your grandma
busts out on holidays) are often called China.

"Porcelain?! Isn't that the stuff they use to make those fancy breakable dolls and grandma china?" a student asked me last week.
Yes. It is. But while porcelain has a reputation for being delicate and refined it is actually really tough and perfect for our mosaic.
Porcelain is a high fire clay that is virtually impenetrable to most liquids after leaving the kiln even without a glaze.After being fired many of the materials that go into making porcelain, like kaolin,quartz and silicates form a glass like structure.  While this bond makes it sound fragile it is actually one of the qualities of porcelain that make it most desirable for our project. The tight bond formed by all of these molecules makes porcelain virtually impenetrable to any type of water or moisture. Moisture is a mosaics arc nemesis. If any type of liquid in the form or rainwater, snow or a spilled latte from the cafe inside were to get behind the tiles it could cause our mosaic to expand and contract with fluctuations in ambient temperature. If this were to occur pieces cracks could form or entire pieces of our precious mosaic could pop off.

Students Sandy Glenn-Collins and Jenn Hildebrand
apply glass flowers to the wall.