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Moved Out of a Familiar Way of Seeing
When I place these two mosaics beside one another, I see more than the passage of time.
The earlier work belongs to a period when I worked with a clear sense of direction. I generally knew where I was going before I began. I valued precision, structure, and the patient placement of stone and glass until the image I carried in my mind began to take form.
The more recent mosaic was made in a workshop with Mireille Swinnen in Belgium. The challenge was not simply learning new techniques, though there was much to learn. It was being moved out of a familiar way of seeing.
I had to look more carefully: at color and its relationships, at the energy created by placement, at the possibilities held in an irregular fragment, and at the way a composition might reveal itself rather than be fully decided in advance.
That shift did not make the earlier work less meaningful to me. I still love its precision and the discipline that shaped it.
But the workshop opened another way of working, one that asked me to respond more directly to the materials, to uncertainty, and to what was happening in the moment.
Green Dog, smalti, gold smalti, 12" x 12", 1998
Poppies, smalti, 14" x 16", 2026
Change does not always come dramatically. Sometimes it works quietly beneath the surface, altering what we notice before we realize we are noticing differently. At other times, it arrives through an encounter that unsettles what has become familiar.
Perhaps the question is not whether we are ready to change.
Perhaps it is whether we can remain attentive when something asks us to see beyond what we already know.
More of my mosaic work can be found at Pam Givens Mosaics.