Porch is a rather pretentious word for the smallish, tiled
concrete slab outside my front door. The grey tiles that covered it have been
cracking for years. It looked rather tired, dreary and run-down (perhaps in keeping
with the rest of this little house, to be honest. Or its owner...). When I first had the thought
to try my hand at mosaics, it was the “porch” I actually had in mind, but it
sat in the too-hard basket for two or so years while I dithered and dallied and did Other Things.
After the success of the Snake Mozake earlier this year, I felt ready to give
it a go. Also, I had a huge bag of cement that needed using before it turned into a Scummo*
My front yard is very much a green space, filled with fairly
overgrown shrubs – many of them native – doing their own thing. These days there’s nothing
very ordered or manicured about it, although it was very neat when I bought it
9 years ago. There’s also a gorgeous flowering gum, beloved of fruit bats,
birds and bees – that has been known to house the odd feather-tailed glider. It
showers the “lawn” with enormous gumnuts that regularly try to kill the lawnmower. I
wanted the porch mosaic to have a bit of that untamed bush greenery feel – to be
an extension of my unruly garden.
So I pulled up the old tiles and chalked a design on the
underlying surface.
In many ways this project was harder than the snake – the overall area was a little larger; I had to use proper tiles rather than smashed crockery, which often has a bit of a curve on the surface; the old tiles, some of which I left on the slab, and some which I broke up and reused, were much thicker than the new tiles. Aaaaand - I had to trust, despite serious misgivings during the construction process, that the grouting would pull it all together and give the design some form. The mosquitoes and wasps were bloody annoying, and once again, my back and knees were crying for mercy after about 3 hours.
On the plus side, the site was less exposed to the midday
sun than the cat palace.
I wanted to try and capture the feel of looking up through the trees to a light, bright morning sky. Something like this:
Here’s what I ended up with after about 2 or 3 weeks… An
Australian Bush Morning. What d’you
reckon? I like it!
*big, heavy lump of uselessness. Pure coincidence that it's the same as the nickname I use for a certain Australian politician...
