Workshop with Francesca Bucca

The joy of joining the Bamm forum is that you find yourself in the middle of your tribe- a bunch of mosaic lovers, all happy to talk about materials, substracts, adhesives and colour grouts. You know you are in good company, when you can have a conversation about tile nippers and not sound weird. This was only my 2nd participation to a face-to-face Bamm forum, but what a treat.

I decided to take part in the Sunday workshop with Francesca Busca. I had followed her for a while on Instagram, and I was intrigued by her making process. The frustration of the forum of course is that there were too many interesting workshops and time only to join one.

Francesca is known for her use of recycled materials and abstract compositions. I thought this would be an interested approach applied to mosaic making. As a biologist, I used to run a lot of science outreach workshops in collaboration with professional artists. We often used recycled materials to create models and artefacts illustrative of scientific concepts or as creative interpretation of scientific ideas. However, I had never used recycled materials in my own mosaic making.

As a recent recruit to the mosaic family, I am still in awe at the beauty of materials. We often have a greediness with materials. Maybe greediness is not quite the right word, more like giddiness with the diversity of materials and colours: glass, smalti, tiles, stones, crockery and the millions of other materials used in contemporary mosaics. Why would we want to restrict ourselves to bottle caps and packets of crisps?

In a world of overconsumption, being challenged by Francesca on our way of looking at materials was very thought provoking. Even though mosaic artists are often using broken crockery, maybe the challenge here was about looking at materials through a different gaze. What we see as trash, such as the cardboard of a packet of biscuits or an old magazine destined for the blue bin, are still materials with value. They have all been processed at great expense and have a significant carbon footprint. We do not see them beyond their primary function. We do not assign them any value, but only think about them as just refuse for our bins.

Challenging our way of looking at these materials with the same reverence we have for our smalti and marble is the provocative stance of Francesca’s mosaic philosophy.

For the piece I made, I chose two types of materials. First, some old prints I had done years ago when I used to do a lot of printmaking. I have piles of various quality monoprints which have crowed my shelves for years. I have done a lot of collages with them, but I was a bit bored with them. They could have stayed on my shelves for another 20 years without being put to any use. It was time to make something with them. The 2nd materials were some carboards from the wrapping of beer cans. My youngest son had had a party and there were a lot of cheap beer bottle wrappings with a beautiful red colour!

I tend to do mostly abstract mosaics, but I challenged myself to do a bird for this piece. Maybe this was the biggest challenge of the day!

Francesca showed us how to fold our materials in different ways to create our tesserae. We then packed our folded materials very close to each together by applying plenty PVA glue. The trick was to use pins to hold our paper tesserae very tight together. Finding ways of folding our paper differently to create various shapes of tesserae was a particularly enjoyable part of the process.

Being a participant on a Bamm forum workshop could be quite intimidating as you are surrounded by very experienced artists. However, everyone was incredibly kind and supportive of each other, learning together a new technique. Thank you to Francesca and fellow workshop participants for being so encouraging.

I am happy with the little bird I made. Ready to experiment further. My street’s What’s app may come handy to collect materials. I am not ready yet to start rummaging in my neighbours’ recycling bins…just kidding! A Bamm forum weekend goes incredibly quickly. I wish we had a mosaic summer camp.