Lace

Lace continues the conversation between textiles and mosaic, but this time the translation feels particularly natural. Both are constructed through repetition, building elaborate surfaces from remarkably simple individual elements.

Embroidery provides the starting point. There is a wonderful economy to traditional stitched pattern, where flowers, leaves and decorative borders emerge from the restrictions of a grid. Curves are suggested rather than drawn, and intricacy develops slowly through accumulation.

Moving that language into mosaic changes its scale and context, but surprisingly little of its underlying logic. A tessera can behave much like a stitch. Colour is placed one small unit at a time until the individual marks disappear into something larger.

Lace pushes this relationship towards the idea of fabric made in glass. The softness is visual rather than physical, created through repetition and the familiarity of textile pattern. Something associated with thread and cloth becomes part of a much more permanent decorative language.

There is a pleasing contradiction in that exchange. Lace traditionally depends upon delicacy, openness and the lightness of thread. Here, those associations survive without the fabric itself. What remains is the pattern, translated into another medium while retaining the memory of where it began.

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