Sally Hares, Butts, Walsall

Sally Hares

Lockdown 2020

My house was built in the 1890’s so this was the second pandemic it had seen, but there was no record of it anywhere – we wished that ‘the walls could speak’.

As an artist, I’d been wanting to capture what Lockdown meant to me but like a lot of people, my creative mo-jo vanished during lockdown.

While I was sitting in the garden one day during the amazing early Summer that we had, I thought about how I could make my walls tell the tale of our Lockdown. After taking a short one day mosaic course to make a trivet three years previously, I’d been collecting tiles and broken crockery in order to do something with them one day. I decided that day had finally arrived!

Under the heading ‘Lockdown 2020’ which is surrounded in ‘PPE blue’ tiles, is  a parade of farm animals that I cut from a plate – this is to represent the ‘Herd Immunity’ that was suggested right at the beginning.

Under that is the ‘Broken Hearts’ section – this is a collection of broken hearts and of things and people we missed the most, which I spelled out with Scrabble tiles: ‘Hugs’, ‘Our Mums’ (in their 90’s and shielding), our Grandchildren’s names and our son living in China. 

Underneath that, the name of the book I’d also been keeping to read ‘one day’ which seemed appropriate to read now – Love in the Time of Cholera. I changed it on the mosaic to read ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ because although the family was apart, we all knew that we were loved.

Under that is the ‘Mrs Hare’ section. Our family name is Hares, so she represents me leaping into Lockdown with her PPE blue face mask on. She’s jumping over hills and a meadow of Italian glass tesserae ‘flowers’. We were hoping to go to Italy on holiday this year, so that’s Mrs Hare, leaping away from her holiday. I had great fun doing the blazing hot sunshine and blue sky that represents the amazing weather we seemed to have every day during Lockdown.

Under that is ‘Daisy Chains’ - the daisies had just started coming out when I began the mosaic and it reminded me of the daisy chains that I’ve loved to make since I was small. The middle of some of the daisies are bottle tops from our favourite beer that was an essential part of Lockdown!!

Under that is ‘The Garden’ which was a bit overgrown before Lockdown, but all of the Spring flowers were coming out to remind us that life was carrying on everywhere.

The other side of the double doors represent all of the flowers that came out in force during Lockdown – immortalised for ever!

Just as I set the last piece, we had bout of rainy weather which has prevented me from grouting it yet.

I’d only ever done the mosaic trivet before this, so there are a lot of things that went wrong, or that I couldn’t go out and buy, but I felt that the mistakes were all part of it. It gave me a focus and helped when, like everyone else, I was struggling with Lockdown. I’ve learned so much about mosaic and want to carry on doing it, now that I know what I should and shouldn’t do! 

I’m glad that I gave my walls a voice.

Made from: reclaimed/gifted ceramic tiles, gifted glass mosaic tiles, gifted/second hand broken crockery, glass nuggets, second hand mirror, Italian glass tesserae, Scrabble tiles.

Wonderful!... More photos to follow from Sally when it's completed.