An Interview With Tessa Hunkin

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Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I went along to meet Tessa Hunkin at Hackney Mosaic Project‘s workshop in the pavilion on Hackney Downs. Sarah photographed the mosaic makers at work while Tessa explained to me how it all came about.

Janice Desler and Jamie Johnson at work

 

The Gentle Author How did you start making mosaics?

Tessa Hunkin I was working as an architect but I was frustrated because I was always telling people to do things that I did not know how to do myself. I wanted to learn how to do something well so that I could design things that were elegant in terms of how they were made. I also wanted to work with colour because architecture is rather a colourless endeavour.

Coincidentally, a friend, Emma Biggs, had seen a programme about the Italian community in London. She had been inspired by film of the old Italian mosaicists at work and began making mosaics in her spare room. So I went and joined her and we worked together for fifteen years. We set up a company called Mosaic Workshop and acquired a workshop on the Holloway Road.

The Gentle Author What kind of work were you making?

Tessa Hunkin It was fairly hideous because we did not know what we were doing. We did doorsteps for shops and so many toilets and bathrooms, miles of Roman borders, rope borders and rolling waves that made us cry with boredom. But we were developing our skills and we began to get more interesting jobs and bigger canvases to play with.

The Gentle Author How did you start creating your own designs?

Tessa Hunkin I had begun developing my own designs alongside commissions from designers. Quite a lot were for rich people who were opinionated or had interior designers, so there were a lot of ‘cooks’ and often designs got compromised.

My colleague Emma pointed out that in public or community art you get to do the design and that might be more liberating creatively. Unfortunately, we only started thinking like this after 2008 when much of the community funding had dried up thanks to the government’s policy of austerity.

There was a reprieve for the London Olympics when there was a bit more money around. So that was our opportunity to try this path. Partly it was the desire to have more design freedom but also I wanted to work with people who might enjoy making mosaics, and who might benefit from and appreciate the creative process in the way that I did.

I was attracted by the idea that you might be able to find volunteers who were not in it for money, but who who loved the medium and enjoyed the process in the way I did. Going into community art was a way of combining all these aspirations.

The Gentle Author Where did it begin?

Tessa Hunkin I had an idea. I found this book of Tunisian mosaics and it was a light bulb moment, looking at these mosaics which depicted everyday life in Roman North Africa.

The book explained how archaeologists had learnt so much about the way the Romans lived and the tools they used. The mosaics were full of life and variety, yet they hung together in a very beautiful and satisfying way.

I thought, ‘Yes, this would work really well as a group project – everybody could contribute a little bit – and also for the Olympics, it could record how we lived in 2012.’

When all the digital data and Google have fizzled out, the mosaic will still be there to show people using mobile phones and iPods. In fact, the mobile phones in the mosaic are already out of date – they have little aerials on them – so it is already fulfilling its purpose.

The Gentle Author Where did you do this?

Tessa Hunkin Hackney were looking for a project for people in recovery from addiction and they were attracted this idea because it was uncontroversial. I spent a lot of time walking around Hackney, which has more parks than any other London borough. I visited them all, photographing suitable walls, but the council did not want mosaics on any of those. Instead, they found a hidden little corner in Shepherdess Walk, off the City Road, and that was the first.

The Gentle Author How did you find it when you began to work with non-professionals? Did you have any experience as a teacher or therapist?

Tessa Hunkin I had done some work at a mental health project. I became involved because Mosaic Workshop, as well as making mosaics, ran a shop selling mosaic materials.

People from the Westminster mental health project came along as customers and that was how I met Susie Balazs who was a wonderful teacher. She was very friendly and her group were always so excited coming to her mosaic workshop and have a go. They possessed a kind of enthusiasm that I saw was invaluable and I wanted to harness that too.

So I only had a little bit of experience and I was nervous about the addiction angle because it was not something I had come across before. In fact, there is a lot of overlap between mental health problems and addiction which can often originate from self-medication. It was a steep learning curve for me, working out how to explain things clearly to beginners and finding tasks that would be pleasurable rather than painful.

One of the elements that came in useful were the Roman borders. These were the very things that had driven us mad when we were doing miles of them for commercial projects but I discovered they work well as learning exercises for beginners. Based closely on the Roman models, they comprise single units endlessly repeated, flowing easily from one to the next.

I had found a way of getting people started and I could see it was working. People liked the amount of concentration that it required even to follow quite a simple pattern but it engaged them sufficiently that they stopped thinking about all the other things that might be preoccupying them. At the end of the session they did not want to leave. That was incredibly satisfying.

To begin with, I divided up the sessions – one for the local community and another for the recovering addicts. But my mental health clients from Westminster also wanted to come and join. For a while, they all had separate sessions.

But they were all so keen, they wanted to come as often as they could. So I gave up the divisions and let everybody could come to everything. Eventually, we had children running around, recovering addicts, some not-so-recovered people with quite serious mental health problems and people who lived close by, all sitting together making  mosaics. It seemed to work out. They finished the mosaics much more quickly than I was anticipating and we have never stopped since.

The Gentle Author I know it has been a great source of inspiration to you, working in this way, and I wanted to know what these people brought to the work. How have you created structures that allow individual input?

Tessa Hunkin  That was another thing I learned from the Romans, through comparing Roman mosaics with nineteenth century mosaics. Those recent mosaics are quite formulaic. They have high quality craftsmanship but they are slightly dead, whereas the Roman ones have much more life to them. They are more irregular, partly because they were using natural materials – stone and things which cut irregularly – but also, because they had a variety of abilities at work. The character of the makers is preserved in mosaic.

The Gentle Author  What do you think the people involved take away from it? How is it therapeutic for them?

Tessa Hunkin It gives people a holiday from their head. It is a simple task that requires concentration and produces something at the end, so it is never time wasted because you can see where your time has gone.

I believe this is fundamental. Once, there were lots of jobs that involved working with your hands but most of those no longer exist in our post-industrial world and for some I think this is an unacknowledged loss.

If you have never try working with your hands you do not know the pleasure and the benefit it can be. It is often dismissed as women’s work – embroidery and knitting and crochet and all those fantastic things – but they are as fundamental as sport.

The Gentle Author Has your approach to design changed through all this?

Tessa Hunkin The gift is that when a commission comes along, now I have all these lovely people who help me create it. Every time I start a design, I think about how to make it as simple and elegant as possible so it is pleasurable to make. I want it to be both beautiful to look at, so the wider community benefits from it too, and I love
creating mosaics for public spaces because I want as many people to see them as possible. If people have enjoyed making them I think that comes out in the work. If they are beautiful to look at as well as pleasurable to make, then that is a win-win.

The Gentle Author I have seen community mosaic projects that are of social value but sometimes the aesthetic is quite random. Yet your work also has this superlative aesthetic quality which makes it outstanding. How you have you reconciled this, raising the bar with all the participants?

Tessa Hunkin They help me willingly and amazingly, but they also get the opportunity to do their own things. That element was not there at the beginning of the project. I have realised that it was a bit much expecting them only to do my bidding, so they alternate between working on commissions where they obey my rules and doing their own projects. I hope they learn from the way I configured mosaics and can translate that knowledge back to their own work.

When you have experience of a technique, you can work out how to achieve strong effects in a way that appears effortless and simple. The Romans understood this and we follow their system, it is a tradition as much as it is my bidding.

The Gentle Author Are you speaking for that tradition?

Tessa Hunkin I am speaking for the tradition and I am also channelling the tradition. Hackney Mosaic Project is a group, a social group, which is particularly important for people in recovery from addiction who often lose their friends. They can become very isolated so this is a way of bringing people together and giving them a social world. The best mosaic of all is the combination of these widely different people who come together and, for a time, form a cohesive and mutually-supportive group. For some, they have replaced one addiction with an addiction to mosaic.

The Gentle Author I am always been touched by the degree of emotional ownership the makers have of the work and their sense of pride.

Tessa Hunkin In our public work, we try to produce something that people genuinely admire. We have now won a real audience and acquired a reputation, and we are very proud of the work we have done, which helps everyone’s self-esteem.

Rosalind Reeder

Janice Desler

Ken Edwards and Katy Dixon

Gabi Liers

Deb Rindl

Katy Dixon

Jamie Johnson

Rosalind Reeder and Tessa Hunkin

Mary Helena

Rosalind Reeder

Janice Desler and Jamie Johnson

Linda Hood

Tessa Hunkin

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

You may also like to take a look at 

The Shepherdess Walk Mosaics