Inspiration for the Unswept Floor Mosaic
For a long time I have been wanting to make my own version of the famous ancient unswept floor mosaic motif. It’s a wonderfully whimsical design of the debris from a Roman feast strewn carelessly over a dining room floor. Animal bones, fruit peel, shells and nuts are among the things that have dropped from the banqueters fingers and remain still, fixed in stone. My version would use both the remains of these long forgotten feasts and items from a modern life to tell a story.
How we met
The story is C’s. I met C. during my first week at university. I was at a fresher’s function feeling awkward and uncomfortable. I remember wine glasses and crisps and stilted conversations with people I wasn’t interested in. And then I saw C. and felt a lurch of recognition which was to prove entirely right.
She was full of energy, fearsomely clever and fearless with it. She didn’t walk, she bounced. She had opinions about politics and life and if she didn’t like something she changed it.
The next three years of university life passed together in libraries, tea rooms and pubs. C. and I shared a house in our second year and while I devoted myself equally to my studies and my horse, she threw herself into more scholarly pursuits. Thirty years later, she is a well known academic.
C’s Unswept floor
So the mosaic, which is a kitchen splash back, would reflect her life. A mother of four children, a teacher and writer about Ireland who has spent most of her working life in London. C is most happy in her vegetable garden deep in in the rolling hills of Normandy.
The original un-swept floors
As far as I know, there are at least three extant versions of the ancient Roman design. One from Aquilea, near Trieste. The photo on the left is a copy of a fragment from that mosaic made by the team at Koko Mosaico.
There is another version dating from the time of Hadrian from the Aventine Hill in Rome now at the Vatican Museum (detail below):
And one at the Chateau de Boudry in Switzerland:
Designing the mosaic – borrowing
I made the mosaic on mesh in four panels – you can see the division lines in the completed work (top) – so it was easy to transport and reassemble.
C. and I agreed that we wanted to include the iconic Vatican mouse. However, her mouse is eating the end of an aubergine (her favourite vegetable) instead of a walnut:
We also liked the fish skeleton so we put that in as a central, balancing part of the design:
The wish bone (Vatican) was added as a reference to the fact that life, however much you try to plan it, is a matter of chance:
The cherries (Vatican) were put in simply because we liked them:
Designing the mosaic – C.’s life
I was keen on an Oyster card to represent C’s London years and we toyed with the idea of a crumpled up piece of paper to symbolise her writing. However, C. vetoed the Oyster card and I felt that the crumpled up paper could be an unreadable mess.
So we ended up with a pen:
Here is a shell to indicate her travels. A shell, although a different one, is part of the debris of the Vatican floor too:
We added a lemon – for the bitterness of life:
And a hydrangea flower and four petals to represent Ireland (where it grows profusely) and her four children (now scattered):
There is also a pair of glasses to indicate the aging process:
And my favourite: a discarded sock which I believe was suggested by her teenage son as a reference to her child rearing years:
C. was fussy about the sock. An earlier version didn’t pass muster. She wanted a sock that would be fully sock-like, bunched up, not entirely clean and infuriatingly single. Such, as they say, is life.