Five kilos of broken bathroom tile became something someone wanted to hang on their wall
I took on a commission last year that I was genuinely unsure about. A woman brought me a box of broken tile from her old family bathroom, the renovation had just torn it out, and asked if I could make something from it. Not a mosaic of something, she said. Just... the tile itself, made into something that feels like it means something.
I said yes because I liked her face and I needed the work. Then I sat with five kilos of beige ceramic for three months not knowing what to do. Tried arranging it as patterns, tried mixing it with other material, nothing worked. It just looked like broken bathroom tile.
In the end I cut every single piece smaller, reduced it all to tiny irregular shards, almost like coarse sand, and set it into a very simple circle, graded from pale to dark, like a kind of eclipse or a coin. No image. Just the material, transformed by being reduced and rebuilt. Took weeks of just cutting and placing, cutting and placing.
She picked it up yesterday and cried. Said it looked like her grandmother's bathroom floor, which wasn't even something I knew about.
I don't know if I'll ever do that again, but I'm glad I did it once. Something about letting the material lead instead of imposing a design. Hard to describe. But it worked.
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Good work. The hardest commissions are the ones where someone hands you a box of their own memory and says "make it matter." Easy to try too hard and overwork it. Sounds like you found the right line.
What'd you end up doing for the finish on the raw edges? Grind or leave them as-is from the break?
That's a good question actually. I've never worked with tile like that but I was wondering the same thing, if you smooth the edges too much doesn't it lose the fact that it used to be a bathroom wall? But raw edges might be sharp. Curious what they went with.
Left them as-is from the break. Ground a couple of test pieces early on and they looked like pebbles, pretty enough but wrong. The sharpness is part of the story, that tile was never meant to be touched, it was a wall. So I kept the edges raw and set them with enough space that nothing cuts you by accident. You can still see the glaze thinning at the corners, the little chips where the wall took a hit years ago. That's the record of it.
Left them as-is from the break. Ground a couple of test pieces early on and they looked like pebbles, pretty enough but wrong. The sharpness is part of the story, that tile was never meant to be touched, it was a wall you looked at but didn't think about. Leaving the edges raw keeps that honesty somehow.