Rearranged: With her mosaics as metaphor, Florence artist Christine Kenneally has pieced together a new life

BY KRISTINA TEDESCHI - STAFF WRITER
Daily Hampshire Gazette, Wednesday, August 01, 2007

With reggae music playing in the background, Christine Kenneally leans over a workbench in her Florence studio, carefully mixing powdered grout with water. With gloved hands she massages the pasty ball until it reaches the consistency of brownie batter. She picks up a chunk and works quickly and purposefully, spreading a layer onto a mosaic depicting delicate purple irises, working the black grout into the cracks between the pieces. After 10 minutes, she wipes away the now-dry grout with a paper towel, revealing the brightly colored glass underneath.

Breaking the old plates, tiles and stained glass she picks up at weekend tag sales and carefully rearranging them into something new has become a kind of metaphor for Kenneally. She started making mosaics three years ago, after discovering that the pieces of her life weren't quite fitting together. She had grown weary of her job as a supervisor at the Food Bank in Hatfield, and her relationship with her boyfriend had reached a dead end. She says she sees the art of mosaic-making as a kind of rebirth, both for the recycled materials she uses and for herself.

She finally opened her business, Smashing Good Times, in a renovated storage shed on her mother's property in January.

"I see, constantly, ways of improving my life and making things better," says Kenneally, who is 28. "I don't necessarily do it," she says with a laugh, "but maybe it plays out in my work."

Kenneally creates pieces that range from small, ornamental mosaics to large, customized installations for kitchen and bathroom backsplashes.

Inspired abroad
The daughter of a painter and art teacher, Kenneally grew up doing art projects, she says. But her interest in mosaics didn't develop until she encountered them while an undergraduate at Siena College in New York during a semester in Spain. There to study Spanish and psychology, she came across the works of Antoni Gaudi during a trip to Barcelona.

"Gaudi's use of broken pottery and abstract shapes really appealed to me," Kenneally says. "He really was the first one to do mosaics in a modern way, instead of the classic Roman way."

Once home and inspired by Gaudi's work, Kenneally visited a friend in Connecticut who made mosaics. "She just had her house full of mosaics," Kenneally remembers. "I didn't want to leave."

Kenneally, who has no formal artistic training, decided she wanted to try her hand at the art form. Guided by her friend, she made her first piece. "I spent 12 hours working on a mosaic," Kenneally recalls. "I couldn't stop."

"It's sort of a sunburst," she says. "It has pieces of mirror in it, with colors coming out of the middle." Kenneally says she still has the piece, and looks at it from time to time to note the progression of her work.

Following her first effort, Kenneally began making mosaics for family and friends. She soon decided to seriously pursue the craft. Kenneally quit her job and ended her relationship with her boyfriend. In 2005, she and a friend bought plane tickets to Mexico City with a return date seven months later.

After weeks of backpacking around Central America, the pair decided to settle in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Kenneally stayed there for a year, perfecting her Spanish, making mosaics and volunteering at a day care center. She got good enough to craft and install a mosaic sign at the day care center and also at the women's weaving cooperative there.

Hammer in hand
In the year since she returned from Guatemala, Kenneally has been working on establishing her business, creating a Web site and drawing up a business model. To keep herself afloat, she also has been working as a waitress at the Brewmaster's Tavern in Williamsburg.

About six months ago, she moved her work into her first studio, located next door to her mother's house on Spring Street. The space, painted in lime green, bright blue and yellow, serves both as her workspace and a place where visitors can look at works in progress and photographs of completed works. A building with a leaky roof once used for storage, Kenneally's studio is now a room with playful curtains in bright pink and orange, wildflowers bunched in a vase on a bureau, and a cozy sitting area to welcome visitors.

At work in the studio, Kenneally begins each piece with her hammer. She wraps whatever material she's working with - a plate, a piece of pottery, a sheet of stained glass - in newspaper so the pieces won't go flying, and then smashes it. Once she has a pile of broken pieces, Kenneally arranges them into shapes, designs or words on a cement substrate. That, she says, is the fun part, playing with the pieces until she's satisfied. To create the perfect shape, Kenneally sometimes employs the "score and snap" method, using a sharp tool to score and then break the material, or tile nippers to snip away excess. She then secures the pieces with glue and covers the piece with grout to make it whole.

Kenneally says she's forever imagining how something she sees, like a tree, for instance, would look as a mosaic. "I'm always looking at shapes and the way shapes fit together, especially in nature," Kenneally says. "You can try things out," she says of making a mosaic. Unlike some art forms, she adds, "It doesn't have to be something that's so hoity-toity and inaccessible."

Kenneally says she likes to be alone when she works, as she doesn't like to talk while creating a project. Still, her studio, with its bright walls and reggae music, is a lively setting.

Kenneally says she likes having a spot away from her Northampton apartment where she can spread out and concentrate on her mosaics.

"It feels good to have a separate work space and living space," said Kenneally. "I think it's very mentally healthy."

Functional creativity
Kenneally specializes in large installments. She sold her first piece, a mosaic kitchen backsplash, last September to a friend in Montague and has since done several ornate kitchen backsplashes for showrooms and private homes in the area.

"In a kitchen, this is a functional thing," she says of her backsplashes. "And there's room for creativity."

She completes each phase of the work herself, from creating the glass, stone, tile or marble mosaic to drilling into studs to install each panel. Kenneally has been learning about the more construction-oriented skills of installing as she goes.

"I call my dad a lot," she says with a laugh.

Recently, at the invitation of a friend, Kenneally again set off for Latin America, this time with a group of young volunteers from a church in Stoneham. In San Bartolo, Peru, Kenneally and other volunteers planned to create and install a permanent mosaic on the wall of a school there.

"They needed an adult who could speak Spanish and who had been to Latin America before," she says.

The volunteers, she says, offered a range of activities, including art and music classes.

Back at home, Kenneally will be teaching classes in mosaics in the fall and is thinking about offering a workshop where participants would use the art form to help cope with grief.

Kenneally held a grand opening at her studio last month, drawing a crowd of about 90, she says, where visitors listened to live guitar music in the spacious garden outside and ate zucchini fritters and salmon dip served by her boyfriend, Bill Bradley, a local chef. Kenneally's studio is now open by appointment. More information is available at her Web site, www.smashinggoodtimes.com.

Kristina Tedeschi can be reached at ktedeschi@gazettenet.com.