Anabella Wewer

I am a graphic designer by profession, working mostly on user interfaces and web applications, but I like to say I am a typographer first. After many years in front of a computer, and having been on the forefront of the desktop publishing revolution, as well as the birth of the web as we know it, I started craving creating with my hands. I missed paper and printing presses and the smell of ink, to be honest. I started learning ceramics and fiber arts, and devoted more time to photography, which had always been a passion. I eventually started working in mosaic which lead me down a path into metalsmithing in a very indirect way (I wanted to make metal masks for a mosaic featuring harlequins…!).

I was born in Venezuela into a Portuguese family, so I grew up speaking both Spanish and Portuguese. My family eventually came to the U.S., and I learned English. Mosaics brought me to Italy where I got to really practice the rudimentary Italian I had from my teenage years. That ability to communicate in Italian has really informed a lot of what I do as a mosaicist, and facilitated my training in the classical ways. Being able to communicate fluently in many languages has also opened up a lot of teaching and learning opportunities, and allows me to really understand the origins of the art and influences of a lot of what I do artistically.

2. When did you know you were an artist?

I pretty much stumbled into graphic design while in college. I had started out in computer science, probably because I simply didn’t know that design was a viable career path while growing up in Venezuela. I still work in the technical field, and am fascinated by all the possibilities of technology, but beautifully designed printed matter or a carefully typeset book make me tingle with delight. All of that is very creative, and I was able to use my innate affinity for color and my love for type in creative ways for years, but I really allowed myself to think of myself as an artist when I was able to tell a story with hard materials and no words. I had made things since I was a young kid, but I didn’t call myself an artist or even a maker until I made an abstract mosaic that I was proud of visually and made people think.

3. Was there a pivotal moment for you?

Yes! I was chaperoning my son’s choral trip to Italy (my first visit there), and we were visiting the Savelli Gallery, just outside of the Vatican. It was really crowded, and looking for some quiet, I rounded a corner away from all the “Pope this and that,” and came face to face with a woman working at a desk. It clearly was an ancient desk, surrounding her on three sides, on a sort of platform. The desk had many compartments filled with colorful filaments of glass. She was making a small, maybe 4” x 4” reproduction of Van Gogh’s Irises.

I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I was enamored. My Italian wasn’t as good as it is now, and I wasn’t confident enough to talk with her, so I left not knowing what that was. It was like no mosaic I had ever seen, so I didn’t even think to search for “mosaic” at first. It was a few weeks before I searched for “micro,” instead of “mini,” “small,” etc. The woman had been making a micro mosaic, using what is called smalti filati, a technique invented centuries before, at the nearby Vatican mosaic studio. I was hooked.

Eventually I spent a month studying the technique, in two different locations in Italy, but I still have a long way to go. Micro mosaic is even more time consuming than mosaics, and there just hasn’t been time for me to go back, but I fully intend to! However, someone advised me early on that I should really learn regular mosaics first, so I went down that path. I took a couple of workshops in the U.S., but quickly decided I wanted to learn the classical tradition, and went to Italy to learn as often as I could. The idea of working in mosaics wasn’t that appealing, honestly. I had only ever seen mosaic on tables, flower pots, and mirrors, and had no idea mosaics could be fine art. That was 2004, and a lot has changed since, both in my exposure to the art form and in the mosaic world in general.

4. Where do you find inspiration?

Inspiration finds me at the most unexpected times: while having dinner, taking a walk, working on something else, in the middle of a conversation with someone…. Ideas come fully formed; I see the finished piece in my mind. I then have to get out of the way, not overthink it, and just make it. Inspiration often comes from nature, or materials themselves, or from looking at other artwork, but the ideas that inform a particular mosaic have usually been sitting around in the back of my mind for a while, waiting their turn. Sometimes the idea is a concept, or a story that needs telling, and my job is to figure out how to use the language of mosaic to tell it. The ideas can be pretty abstract themselves.

I try to be open to seeing details, especially in unexpected places or contexts. It’s sometimes a problem, because I don’t remember the overall context, I just remember what a particular color looked like when the light was filtered through a hole, for example, and then spend endless hours trying to achieve that look with hard materials with a limited chromatic range.

5. What is your favorite medium?

It’s been some time since I’ve worked with metals (with the logistics of studio space), but I’d be hard pressed to choose between metalsmithing and mosaics. The works I make through each are very different in nature, requiring different skills and a different mindset. Unlike mosaics, jewelry is very personal to the wearer, which means I need to hit different notes. Mosaics, on the other hand, allow me to tell more complex stories and work more freely. I am really at home with either. 

6. Can you describe your process?

I am truly a process mosaicist. What I mean is that while I am proud of, and generally really like the works when they are finished, once I finish them, they are wall hangings. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at them, except when I am using them as examples to teach with, or others ask me to talk about them. What I truly love is the actual making; the search for the right material; the testing of techniques to make sure the work will “say” what I want it to say; testing textures and color combinations until I get it right; figuring out the technical challenges of my increasingly complicated substrates; it is all part of the making, it is not just making lines with hard materials.

I love the time cutting natural materials and seeing the inside of a stone for the very first time. Many times that process leads to ideas for new projects, just because of the qualities of the materials. I save some materials for years, until the right design comes along for a particular stone. It requires that I am open to what the materials are telling me and to seeing things in new ways, instead of imposing my will upon them (though that does happen often enough!). Sometimes it’s simply not giving up on a stone and trusting the right idea will come.

I don’t sketch a lot. I tend to not work out a design on paper (but I never did in graphic design either). I instead go for a walk or do something else, until I can work it out in my head. I am open to the design changing while I am working on it, open to letting the idea develop and be free. It is one of the benefits of working mostly on abstract works; I don’t have to faithfully reproduce a person or an object. I am using materials and lines, the mosaic language, to speak freely, making use of the strength or delicacy of either to communicate thoughts.

7. Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your work?

I generally write statements because they are required of me. I understand that they help people comprehend what I meant to say, to put the work in context. But I am more interested in what others see in the work, what it means to them, with the strength of their experiences and background, and what they bring to that moment when they interact with my work. I’d love to listen in on the conversations that happen then, between people, or within them, about how the work affects them, what it means to them.

Mosaic is an ancient art form, one which provides immense possibility, and one with a tradition and history I choose to honor and carry forward. It is a slow art, whose knowledge was passed on orally and at the hands of a master, in an apprentice setting, for hundreds of years. New technologies and ease of travel have given mosaic a resurgence, but also a lot of conflicting information. “Truths” are passed on in a whisper-down-the-alley sort of way, leading to mistaken information being written about in well-respected books, with little to back them up. I currently am involved in a lot of research to correct some of the terminology commonly used in our community, or at least to question its translated definitions. It is a sometimes perilous space to be in, because defining mosaic itself is so controversial, especially in the English speaking world.

What mosaic can do is what I am interested in challenging as an artist, as opposed to what it is. Using the ancient techniques with modern technologies (lighter substrates, stronger adhesive, etc.), we have the opportunity to bring mosaic forward, away from a flat surface, or as decorative covering for architectural features, and into the fine art realm, capable of conveying emotion and meaning, and eliciting an emotional response from viewers, as art does.