What began with a shopping list

My notes for tonight’s entry began with a shopping list crafted early last Sunday: super glue & white wine. It was a week ago tonight and considerably earlier in the evening when I set out to “finish” the Barbie Lamp. Just typing those words make me snicker now, as it took longer that I’d expected and came with a few kinks in the plan.



Gravity & Grout
The lamp is a cylinder and to be sure, I’ve forgotten a good deal of my geometry and calculus., which would have been quite helpful in planning how much grout to mix. My first batch began with 3 tablespoons of grout and enough water to make is smooth like pancake batter, the kind you whip up for a tall, thick stack. While I generally begin applying grout with a Popsicle stick, I like to mix it up with a fork. I likely have just horrified my previous dinner guests and scared away any future ones, but the fork is better than a whisk, which whips in too much air, or the popsicle stick, which doesn’t blend well, for breaking down the powdery chunks into a smooth, fine grain.

My first batch may have begun with three heaping tablespoons of grout and just more than equal parts water (yes, I have dedicated measuring and mixing utensils for my art projects) but required a re-up at least 7 times. Along the way I stopped measuring, stopped, keeping track and just kept scooping (the wine likely contributed to lax data gathering).

Much like it took more china than I’d expected, I used WAY more grout than I had expected to. Lucky for me, I buy my grout in bulk (at least bulk for my projects even though it may be the smallest box I found at Home Depot) leaving me plenty to work with. Good thing since it took more than a cup of dry grout to polish this lovely lamp.


So how to grout the lamp? Why, lie it down on its side and gently spread the smooth, wet grout, just like have done with my previous pieces. But here’s the rub: the lamp isn’t flat. And I didn’t want to apply the grout in more than one session. Wouldn’t it just be my luck that rotating the lamp to apply grout around it while it’s on its side would send otherwise cured snippets of adhered china flying into the living room or crumbling on the counter under my – what I thought was gentle – roll of the lamp. So, the lamp had to stand tall and receive its grout.

Applying grout to a vertical object requires a bit of skill. While this is a skill tillers are well versed in, all my past projects have been flat objects lying down. The key here: thick pancake batter. Thick because gravity and thin grout are messy.

The Birth of the Barbie Lamp

I began working on mosaics several years ago and work almost exclusively with hand-painted Japanese china. Last year I went to the Altered Barbie show in SF and when I received their call for entries email a couple of weeks ago, I decided to broaden my mosaic medium and make a Barbie mosaic.

BarbieFight is a chronicle of the creation of my Barbie Lamp that I plan to submit for the show. It may also become a space for talking about other girlie projects I work on so the name Barbie Fight works on many levels (Thanks Paul -- I'm loving the name).

When I begin work on a mosaic it often starts with china I have bought from an unknowing soul who is elated to pass on a gorgeous tea set (sometimes even with dessert service) to someone they think will use it for tea and cakes. I silently snicker when I read their kind words, understanding their very valid misconception and imagining where I’ll make my first break in that saucer or where I’ll sever the spout from the teapot.

For me, these pieces, the china-mosaic is all about deconstruction-reconstruction. It’s about taking something beautiful and breaking it down into its component parts, parts not imagined by its previous owner. I think this is also why I like covering everyday objects: terracotta pots, picture frames, tiny table tops.

So know you know a little about what I do, here is the story of my Barbie Lamp:

I began this project with an idea: find Barbie tea sets and make a lamp mosaic. This was much harder than I imagined. For one, I could only find 2 patters of porcelain Barbie tea sets. The rest were plastic. And the two I found were honest quite uninspiring. I bought one and suspect I won’t use any of it for this project. It’s just too boring.



What to do with this? Clearly I need to find some porcelain Barbies and break them up. The tea sets are not going work.