The UNBROKEN Mosaic Series

11.25.2020 New! Watch the making of this series on Buzzfeed. Thank you for helping us raise $2000 for Doctors Without Borders with this series.

My obsession with broken pottery began with my creek cleanup series, but it didn’t end there. When I told one of my best friends we’d be moving back to BC, she gave me one of her dishes to break and put into my creek glass mosaics.  It gave me an idea to make an entire series out of broken dishes - the best way I could think of to mark this overwhelming year of change that is 2020.  

Friends, family and collectors sent me unwanted and damaged dishes, and I combined these with thrift store finds and even some family dishes. When I broke a dish accidentally in our move, I added that one in too. I combined all the broken pieces together to make a series of BC wildflower mosaics. 

I put the series name up to a vote on Instagram, and you chose Unbroken as the title of this series. At first, I wasn’t sure about this name; it’s too dramatic for my own situation. It’s been a difficult year of upheaval for sure, but in 2020 terms we have nothing to complain about.  Thankfully, our family are all healthy still, and we’re together now in BC. Many of you have been through much more.  But this is a community series - it’s not about me.  Only one of these broken dishes is mine; the rest were given to me by family and friends and this group of collectors.  

This series incorporates dishes from people in my old city and my new town, dishes from my friends, neighbors and art collectors.  There’s a dish from my parents’ wedding set - my mom served us thousands of meals on these, in many little towns growing up.  There’s a dish from my grandmother, who lived through two world wars and the 1918 pandemic. There’s a dish from my husband’s grandma, who went through all those same events in parallel, though they never met each other. There are thrift shop dishes from people that I know nothing about; all I know is that they were done with these dishes, and passed them on. 

Fancy dishes can carry so much meaning and memory - we receive them at weddings, inherit them from our elders, use them to serve important meals, keep them for decades in special cabinets. More than one person that gave me an old dish to break told me “You know, I kept these for so long but I never actually liked them that much.”   It was fun to break these things that didn’t spark joy, and make them into something new.  This series is the convergence of all those stories, rebuilding our lives and routines as we look with hope toward next year.

 What did you have to let go of this year? Which things will you miss? Which things will you not miss about our lives before 2020? 

$2000 from this series was donated to Doctors Without Borders.