My neighbour's renovation gave me a bucket of 1960s tile and now I have a problem
The building next to mine is being gutted and the workers are dumping the old bathroom tile in the skip, so I asked and now I have maybe forty kilos of pale green 1960s tile in the courtyard, in a bucket, getting rained on.
Here is the thing. I have no design for it. None. I took it because it was about to go to landfill and because the green is very good, a colour nobody makes anymore, and now it sits there and every morning I look at it from the kitchen window and feel slightly accused.
My teacher in conservation would have had a word for this. He called it magazaki thinking, shop thinking, the habit of stocking material you have no use for because it was cheap or free or beautiful. He was right and I still do it.
Problem is this green does not sit with smalti. It is too soft, too matte, it goes grey next to glass. So either I build the whole thing around the tile, which means a very different piece than what I have been making, or the bucket stays in the courtyard until spring.
Forty kilos. I weighed it, of course I weighed it.
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feel like the bucket getting rained on is the most honest stage of this. every good material I've ever hoarded started as a vague accusation in a corner before it turned into anything. forty kilos is a lot though, like that's not a mosaic that's a backsplash for a whole other apartment.
also pale green 1960s tile is genuinely the good stuff. the pigments in that era are unrepeatable, so a bucket of it is basically a small inheritance with no will attached. no design yet is fine. the design usually shows up after the material's been staring at you long enough to get annoying.
"small inheritance with no will attached" is very good, I am stealing that. And you are right that the rain is doing it no harm, it is glazed, it has survived fifty winters on a wall.
Forty kilos is a lot, yes, but half of it is cut-offs and broken pieces. The whole tiles I might keep for something flat. The broken ones are already thinking about being something else, I just have not been told what yet. Annoying is the correct word for the stage I am in.