Dreams

Dinosaur Mosaics are one-of-a-kind sculptures are about recycling, history and the melding of art and science. I create these mosaics on plaster jackets that were used to transport fossils safely from the field, back to a museum prep lab. Creating truly “green” sculptures, I use broken, hand made pottery (mostly my own broken creations of time gone by), prairie glass and other found objects in the creation of the mosaics. My creations keep paleontology cast offs and broken pottery out of the landfill. By bringing science cast offs and broken pottery together into mosaics, the end product is my artwork, intended to create beauty from no longer wanted, broken or otherwise un-useful objects. Nothing mass-produced here. A piece of history, millions of years for the fossil to form and be found, lots of hands to create and use old bottles, and then to discard them on the prairie for me to find years later, and many broken pots and tiles to create these mosaics.



Dreams
18 x 11 x 3 inches


Dreams was created from the field jacket this extinct Slylemys tortoise found in Sioux County, NE in the White River Formation.  The White River Formation is a sandstone and mudstone formation containing many vertebrate species formed approximately 35 million years ago when western Nebraska was continuing to cool from the very warm early Eocene epoch into, as represented here, the more ecologically diverse Oligocene epoch.  Picture at this time some deciduous trees and an expansion of grasslands.  This Stylemys tortoise ate plants and insects.

Special thanks to: J-P Cavigelli, Tate Geological Museum, Casper College; Wikipedia; U. of CO Museum of Natural History; U of CA Museum of Paleontology; E. Evenoff, UNC Dept of Earth Sciences, GSA abstract
This is a mosaic entitled Dreams. There is a photo of this sculpture in the October 2008 issue of American Style Magazine.This is the first Dinosaur Mosaic that I created. I was inspired to create this mosaic ever after attending  NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) and seeing all sorts of mosaics there.

I came home and started going through my collection of my artwork that had broken over the years and had fun breaking up more things I now deemed "not good enough". Knowing I had rescued this plaster jacket from the trash can for it's interesting shape a few years prior, I started glueing! I didn't know then that this plaster jacket, then deemed trash, would spur me off into a whole new direction in my artwork endevors.












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