All Consuming: Mosaic Art by Cleo Mussi

We flagged up mosaics and marbling as two key trends in decorative design in Visuology Issue 2.  In particular, we’ve noticed that artists, craftspeople and accessories designers are increasingly employing traditional mosaic work in art and interiors.

Childlike, yet troubling, Cleo Mussi’s reclaimed ceramics draw on the interaction of human life with the natural world and the fact that, eventually, nature recycles everything.

Nature Recycles Everything 

In a ‘Silent Spring’

We the keepers of ‘Spaceship Earth’

Are building life from the bottom up.

Where waste = food and

Nature recycles everything.

 

All Consuming

To market, to market

With my little basket

To buy bonds and shares

And a homogenized franchise.

To market, to market

To buy a free market

With plenty of debt

And fictional targets.

What ‘sports’ are we

To hunt and gather

“For too much of a good thing

is not a good thing” at all.

Mussi’s forthcoming exhibition, which opens at Stroud’s Museum in the Park this Saturday, considers man’s impact on the environment and our desire to consume and collect everything. The show will feature 70 works (some previously featured at the Craft Council’s Collect). 

Mussi “wrestles with the grand themes of human existence from inspirational idea to intricately detailed mosaic narrative,” says Dr Paul Patterson. “In All Consuming, art meets science in a dramatic exposition that leaves us in no doubt as to the precariousness of our current situation.”

Sucking the Gut 

In the age of giants

Coporate junk science

Filter bubbles, whilst sucking the guts

For greater GDP

And a one way ticket

On the super highway.

Fuel for Thought

In an immoral economy

Material self interest and

The delusion of endless growth

Up end the natural equilibrium.

Whilst ‘Solving for Pattern’

Fixes the whole,

And Pneuma sustains.

The exhibition has a story in the authentic manner of folk art, “reflecting the world we live in, whilst connecting to bygone days,” says Mussi. Used plates, bowls, teapots and other found objects are representative of a previous life and reminders of our living past – in the universal tradition of ‘dreamtime.’ Each mosaic collage is accompanied by Mussi’s personal notes, along with her dark sense of humour.

Monoculture Perfection

The perfect Monoculture

Is ‘All Consuming’.

With a propensity to maximize output

And minimize diversity with maximum impact.

Concerned individuals and faceless giants

Adapt and restore

And make a truce with nature.