Pique assiette mosaic artist Jenifer Strachan is an artisan in the oldest sense of the word, a highly skilled craftsman. Although the name pique assiette – which means “plate thief” or “stolen from plates” – was not coined until the 1930s, it is an antediluvian craft dating back to ancient Greece and Rome when bits of terra cotta pottery, glass beads, and gems were used to add color to wall tableaus. Today, this found-object art utilizes primarily broken dishes to create colorful, textured montages.
Jenifer’s pieces are sophisticated and intricate, whimsical and romantic. Through this unusual technique of artfully laid fragments of broken dishware she is able to convey uncanny depth. Her framed portraits of women are rich with expression, warmth, and character. Exotic plants, butterflies, and bees on her birdbaths and garden pools resonate with color and life. Shower and bath installations sparkle – with sunlight on waves, perhaps a disappearing mermaid tail, or an arch of sea spray. “My mosaics are more like paintings,” Jenifer says. “But for my palette, I’m using broken dishes.”
Jenifer grew up in an artistic family – her father, Bob Strachan, collects antique Japanese fabrics to create beautiful quilts, which are rather like mosaic art in design and visual impact. “And I’ve been sketching and drawing all of my life,” Jenifer says. But she did not begin her career as an artist until the early ’90s. She graduated from Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, class salutatorian, in 1981, and by 1989 earned two bachelor of science degrees – natural resources and international agricultural development – from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with follow-up graduate studies in nutrition.
However, after her first trip abroad to Barcelona, Jenifer’s career took an unexpected turn away from her formal education interests. Profoundly impacted by the work of architect Antonio Gaudí – who was at the forefront of the Spanish modernisme (art nouveau) movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and whose legendary, ornate mosaics adorn entire rooftops; decorate sidewalks, benches, and pools; and embellish building facades – Jenifer came home inspired enough to take on her first project: a sculpted fifty-foot mosaic bar for her friend’s Spoleto Restaurant in Northampton. She persuaded him to let her do the mosaic bar instead of the formica one he had planned on. A self-taught artist, she discovered an innate talent, exceptional dexterity, and an eye for design.
Some pique assiette mosaic artists use tiles in their work, but Jenifer does not. “And I never, ever break anything I’m working with,” she notes. Her technique is different from most, and this brings a more polished quality to the work. “I hand cut every single fragment I’ll use in a mosaic, and I only work with plates and cups that are already damaged – if they’ve got a crack or a chip already.” It’s not just that she abhors the violence of smashing them, but because she uses only antique dishware, she says she can’t help but be drawn to the implicit history in each piece. “I just think about how many tables have been laid with this plate, or meals shared with it; how many hands have washed it, or packed it to move. Or whether someone has gotten into an argument or grieved a loss while sipping tea from this pretty cup. Were they upset when it got this chip in it?” (The teacup is, in fact, one of her favorite images to create.)
Jenifer’s small, intimate mosaics and spectacularly large installations grace walls and brighten yards from California to Switzerland. For more than a decade, her mosaics have been shown (or installed) at galleries and museums around the country. The walls of Oak Bluffs’ Oyster Bar Grill currently display several of her mosaics, and a selection of her work can be viewed on her website: www.mvmosaics.com.
Shrouded by the green of the forest at her home in West Tisbury, Jenifer’s secluded tree-house studio has a fairy-tale aura. Inside the shack, shelves of glass jars filled with antique charms, earrings, old buttons, coral, seashells, bits of glass, and beads are only accents to the stacks aside stacks of dishware – literally hundreds of broken plates and fragments of pottery, china, and ceramics. Blue delft from Holland, majolica found in New Orleans, cracked Blue Willow teacups, even a cigar box full of soft, rounded shards of pottery that washed up on a beach in Thailand. Her workspace reflects years of study, travel, and collecting, and exudes a rare respect for the journey behind every cup, saucer, and plate.
Hand cutting all of the fragments she’ll use to transform a drawing into a three-dimensional mosaic is no small task. In an amateur’s hands, the pliers feel clumsy and awkward and it’s almost impossible to make a decisive cut without instantly shattering the fragment of china, or creating a spider web of cracks that will make it unusable. But Jenifer’s dexterity and control are such that she can cut the curves of a woman’s lips, the arch of her nose, and the curl of her eyelashes – as in her poignant self-portrait called True Love that has the artist’s beloved cat Obie curled at her shoulder.
While the fragments, or tesserae, are of course integral to the overall effect, “it’s also about the spaces between them,” Jenifer points out, “which you can see make a sort of labyrinth pattern.” She cuts and aligns them so accurately there’s barely a hair’s width between certain fragments. But sometimes, she says, “because a wider space can create a different effect, definition, or illusion of depth,” she’ll lay the pieces farther apart.
In her workshop, her treasures are carefully sorted into piles, among them, a collection of sailing images from which Jenifer chose the miniscule etching of an old schooner with the words “Historical Ports of England, the Port of Hull” and worked it into a brilliant mosaic that wraps around three walls in Kristina and Gary Maynard’s kitchen.
“Kristy has always been really supportive of my work,” Jenifer says. “Then, when her husband Gary [co-owner with Kristina of Holmes Hole Builders] built their new home in Chilmark, she pulled out a box full of her grandmother’s china that had been on a shelf that collapsed. Every piece was broken. She came to me and asked if I could make a mosaic from them. But they’re sailors too, so I wanted to work in other things that would have meaning to them, like the Port of Hull shard.”
Kristina had complete faith in the artist’s creative ability and integrity. “Jenifer’s my favorite artist,” Kristina says. The walls of the Maynard home already display a Jenifer Strachan monarch butterfly and a Strachan swan.
Kristina’s only stipulations for the mosaic that now defines her kitchen were that the color palette be primarily in the blue and white range of her grandmother’s china – and that one of the central images be a white horse. The latter request was in honor of her daughter Clara’s pony Rocko, who was led right into the kitchen to be part of the photo session the day the mosaic was installed.
“I’ve been watching [Jenifer] and collecting her work for years,” Kristina says, “but I’ve never had anything this dramatic.”
