The Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol 49 No 3 November 2010

Technical: Mosaic
Courtyard building site before installation
Courtyard wall installed; photos: artist
The Northbridge House
Living with Garry Bray, an architect, has given me great opportunities to help him with the interior
design and decoration of a few individual house projects, helping him choose colours for external walls,
tiles for the bathrooms, carpets and lights for his clients.
Recently Garry was deSigning a house in Northbridge for a husband and wife. He wanted to make
the smallish formal dining room spill into the outside so that it felt much larger. We decided it needed
a feature wall at the end of the long rectangular space to attract the diners to the exterior, a way to
finalise the space, making it into an inside-outdoor room.
I met the clients, a lovely couple of Italian background, and he seriously didn't want a mosaic 'il
I'ltalienne'. It took me a few meetings of 'show and tell' to persuade him that mosaic can be modern
and contemporary. He seemed to have an epiphany when he saw a tile painting of mine at an
exhibition. "Sophie l Can you do this one for me, but larger?" '" and that was it!
W ith his wife, we designed the courtyard - the surrounding benches for the pillows, the tree beds,
the water trough, the lights and the ledge for the sculpture.
The dining room is used mainly at night and so an indoor-outdoor room was developed with the
space extending to an intimately scaled external courtyard. By working hand-i n-hand with Garry, from
sketches to completion of the idea, my mosaic and the special lighting became an integral part of the
design.
THE 10URNAL OF AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS NOVEMBER 2010 49