Tawnya Lively, American
Anthemis Landscape, 2018
This mosaic, a part of Lively’s Firestorm Mosaic Project, is made from the shattered ceramic pieces of a cookware dish that was destroyed in the October 2017 forest fires in California. This mosaic depicts a small landscape scene in which a few yellow flowers bloom into a white sky of fragmented porcelain. On the level of content, Anthemis Landscape highlights the paradoxical struggle of growth from destruction —flowers growing from the ashes of a wildfire are quite literally illustrated by these images of flowers growing out of fragmented ceramic. By taking a material object from these fires and constructing a seemingly optimistic, though contradictory, image of regrowth from cataclysmic destruction, this mosaic also operates as an affective archive of the fires, documenting not just the reality of the event but the inescapable fears, emotions, and hopes which surround and permeate the fires. Label by Maxwell Cloe