Piece Work

Mosaic Artist Lizz Van Saun

She's gotta hammer… and a pair of nippers.

Breaking up is hard to do. Well, not so much for mosaic artist Lizz Van Saun of Hopkinton. Van Saun uses unwanted china and takes a hammer or glass nippers to it, breaking it to bits and embedding the shards in grout.

The grout can be applied to any stable surface. Van Saun uses recycled furniture, old vases, chairs and even glass with frames. In most of her work the broken glass or ceramic pieces create a delightful abstract design with similar shades providing an undulating rhythm of color. In pictorial work, birds are currently her favorite imagery and can be found as a focal point in a sea of broken ceramics or castoffs from glass studios. She occasionally uses three-dimensional ceramic figurines, like those ones from Red Leaf Tea, as a bit of comic relief. And how can you not smile at the eggs and bacon on the chair shown here?

If you are interested in preserving Grandma's china in a unique way, Van Saun creates custom work. If you want to gain the skill yourself, she teaches classes out of her Hopkinton studio and offers community mosaic projects.

Find Van Saun and her affordable work at the Concord Winter Giftopolis on December 7 in Eagle Square from 6 p.m. to midnight. She is also the featured artist at Dos Amigos in Concord for the month of December.