GARDEN WALL: Tessera
Photo by Steve Weinik
Tessera is a part of the Garden Wall mural series, a project that is collaborative in both design and implementation.
This iteration was designed and painted by Color Me Back participants recruited directly through Mother of Mercy House in Kensington. All new flower imagery has been derived from the community engagement on site. The flowers were selected for their personal significance, comfort, and sense of home: Azaleas, Peonies, Daisies, and the Bayahibe Rose, the national flower of the Dominican Republic.
In addition, participants made collage mosaics from repurposed paintings, revisiting imagery from the Garden Wall series in a totally new way. The mosaics, made of discarded paintings, contain the markings from past participants and often have been arranged by more than one person. This process effectively increases significantly the number of collaborators on this mural.
The mural is installed on custom aluminum panels cut exactly to the dimensions of the composition. They are removable–so the mural can move with the building’s tenant–and it can be reconfigured to make a new arrangement to fit a new space.
The design includes highly realistic, highly stylized, totally abstract, and collaged imagery. All of these ways of seeing and means of expression are connected and reflect the wide array of experiences and interests of the many people who participated in making it.
Photos from the process:
