Vandalism - Part Une

On Tuesday, May 20, at 5:21 pm, I completed laying the tesserae of Mariam Mesh. 

Mariam Mesh is an experimental piece. I am trying 2 new techniques with her. 

• She is built on a fiberglass Mesh. (I will detail the hows and whys in a future post)
• I am using a different glue on part of her - a flour based "Colla de Farina". With the hope to speed up the cleaning of the mosaic. 

Remember that I work mostly Reverse Method. I build my mosaics upside down, mounted on a model with a commercial water soluble glue. Then come several operations before I can separate the actual mosaic from the model. I have described this on several videos on my Mosaicblues Youtube Channel.

Once removed the model, there is still quite some time left to clean up the glue.
This  is why I decided to try this flour based glue, hoping it would be easier and faster to clean up thatn my regular glue...

On Wednesday morning, after feeding my chickens (you can hear them in most of my mosaics videos), I went to the shop to check on Mariam. And THIS is what I found :

Vandalized, most of the tesserae of Mariam's face and part of her eyes where laying shattered on the rest of the mosaic, or beside it...

I was worried, wondering who could have done this. Then I realized that only these tesserae glued with the flour glue had been shattered, something odd was at work there... No human would have been able to know the difference.

And then I remembered a young dead rat on the ground of the chicken pen. Rats don't usually die in the open. ( I know things about rats)

It did not take long to connect the dots. The rodent(s) had feasted on the flour glue. Unfortunately for this one, small shards of glass embedded in the glue must have caused his death by internal bleeding.

I have now finished the repairs (6 hours of work), and am covering the mosaic with heavy tiles when I get out of the shop. I am not sure whether I will keep using the "Cola di Farina" or not. This will depend upon the ease of cleaning it up once I flip the mosaic. 

This incident is a good illustration of how even minor changes in the way we do things can sometimes have unsuspected consequences. 

We should probably not trust corporations or governments when they tell us new technologies such as GMOs or fracking are absolutely safe...

Just saying ...