Community Art at Yardley Wood 100ft Mosaic

The 100ft Mosaic Project.

In July of 2016, I was assistant artist to Caroline Jariwala of Mango Mosaics. We worked on a Community Art Project called the 100ft Mosaic Project at Yardley Wood Community Primary School, Birmingham, UK. There were 15 panels in all which were designed to be installed on a wall outside. The designs were based on the school children’s drawings of flowers and other mandala type shapes. Caroline worked with the children to develop the designs and then she transferred them to the mosaic panels as outlines which could then be filled in with the mosaics by the children and teachers. The mosaics were created using pieces of broken ceramic tile and some shaped tiles too (shaped with tile nippers). Because of the large scale of the panels, some of the tile pieces were quite large. There are mainly flower motifs, a dragonfly and a bird make an appearance as well as Caroline’s signature bee logo.

Grouting and Finishing.

I worked with some of the children helping them fill in the shapes with tiles and then the work of grouting began! It was incredibly hot in the classroom and we had to work quickly to cover such large areas of mosaic. Good job there were two of us working in tandem. That helped a lot. Once the grouting was done we glued plastic profiling onto the edges of the ply to seal them.

Here are some images of the work and a video on Caroline’s youtube channel of how it looked when we had finished everything off.