Aga mosaic — William Newman Mosaics

Last year I designed and made a mosaic for an Aga backsplash.

The client lived on the exposed hills of Dartmoor in Devon, providing the perfect inspiration.

Using her love for native birds we choose to have a collection of Swallows and a single House Martin for the design, her family helped choose the colours for the border.

The home interior included stone walling locally sourced, so we added a mixture of lipi blue and travertine marble tessera as the background, giving the piece a ‘chromatic vibration’. In ancient times it was often a necessity to mix different hues of tessera, since no batch of tessera, whether it be marble or another material, was exactly the same. I used vitreous glass for the birds and border.

A traditional method known as contouring is used around the edge of each bird, this promotes movement. The background uses horizontal andamento, creating a simple and clean finish.

Since the piece was for a wall the double direct construction method was used. It allowed me to easily work directly from the design. I used a waterproof PVA to stick each individual tessera down to a fibre glass netting. Use a plastic film between the full size paper print out of the design and the glue!

It was initially constructed in my workshop and then transported to the client’s home. As it was too large to handle in one piece I divided it up into three sections along carefully chosen contours and andamento. If you are thinking of transporting a mosaic use bits of plywood in between each section when it is in transit.

These are the products I used on the day of the installation (I’m not sponsored by Mapei!)

To stop any potential staining of the natural marble it is important to seal the tessera before grouting, this was done after I had stuck the tesserae on the fibre glass netting.