The wooden spool end before the mosaic and concrete.
I’m always interested in manmade constructions altered by the environment and time, and when I kept finding broken fragments of marble paving stones, concrete pathing, ceramic tiles, and so forth, I started picking them up. After amassing quite a collection, I decided I’d make a mosaic that referenced some of the artifact displays I’d seen in Athenian museums, so I took the angle grinder with a diamond blade to them to cut them down to at or below my desired height.
I then put one unique piece per type into the second recycled wood round from the electrical spool - this one had the upraised interior wooden frame with a circular outside and a square inside. (To block the holes, I had already cut and glued down a piece of masonite to the back - see the image to the left.) Once I found the layout I wanted, I put a smoother white concrete (compared to the previous large-grogged grey type I used in Realms) in and around it. I thought I probably wanted to paint it, but by this point my show installation was the next day so we just installed it in that mid-way state.
Once installed, my show was up until my last day in Athens, so I then took it down and brought it back to the US. Then I began to test out different possible compositions in Photoshop, and I settled on painting a couple rings of color - the inner gold and the outer blue - around the central composition in a design that references the mati aka evil eye charms. The three cool-colored mosaic fragments in the center are intentionally reminiscent of an eye as well.
After I painted the two rings, they looked too new, so I weathered them a little and made the blue border bleed into the white band inside to soften that edge.
This is Pathways, found marble, concrete, and ceramic paver fragments with acrylic and concrete on recycled wood round, 17.5x17.5x.1.3, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's Greek pathways mosaic relief.
