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Got asked to do a live demo at a gallery opening in Athens next month. They said "the guests would love to watch you work." I said do you know what mosaic looks like in real time? Because I sit on a pillow on the floor and cut one piece of stone at a time and stare at it for ten minutes before I set it. That's a Tuesday. It's not performance, it's just slow. They said it's fine, people find it meditative. We'll see. Anyone else get asked to turn their studio practice into a show and find out it doesn't translate?

There's a cafe two streets from my apartment, been there forty years, looks like nobody touched the decor since 1992. I go there sometimes when I need to get out of the studio but don't want to go far. Last month I noticed the corner of a rug was lifting near the counter, and underneath there's clearly a mosaic floor. Not a good one, late Byzantine, provincial work, big tesserae, crude faces, but unmistakable. I asked the owner. She said "yeah, we put the rug over it because customers said it was ugly." I'm not making this up. A thousand-year-old floor and people found it offensive to their frappes. I told her what it was and she shrugged. Said I could lift the rug if I wanted, she doesn't care. So now I go once a week and uncover a bit more, drink my coffee, stare at this thing that's survived empires and earthquakes and is now being protected from criticism by a machine-woven rug from IKEA. Anyway. If anyone needs me I'll be on my knees with a soft brush and a very patient waiter.🙂

There's this late Byzantine panel from the Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki, Christ Pantokrator, standard stuff, and I copied it by hand for a conservation module back in 2004. Six weeks on my knees, matching every tessera, and I got it so close my professor kept it as a teaching example. The joke is that piece ruined me. I can't look at a face in mosaic anymore without measuring the eye spacing against that Pantokrator. Last week I finished a portrait commission, contemporary, abstracted, not even trying to be realistic, and I spent an hour staring at it thinking the left eye is two millimeters too far out. Client won't see it. Nobody will see it. But I know it's there because of a dead Byzantine emperor's face I memorized twenty years ago. Anyone else carry a reference piece in their head like a splinter? Something you studied so hard it rewired your eye permanently.

So I'm at this group show, standing maybe a meter from a piece of mine, and this guy walks up to the person next to him and starts explaining how mosaic is done. "They take the stones, see, and they grind them down to fit, and then they glue them onto a backing, it's very time-consuming." He's right next to me. I'm wearing the same jacket I was wearing when I was cutting that smalti at 11pm two nights before. Still have grout under my nails. And he's explaining it to someone like I'm not there, like the person who made it couldn't possibly be in the room. I said "it's actually easier than it looks" and walked away. Couldn't decide if I wanted to laugh or toss a handful of tesserae at his head. So I just went and found the wine. Does this happen to anyone else or is there a sign on my forehead that says "please explain my own job to me"?

I have this piece, it's a landscape with a lot of tiny tesserae, and it's technically perfect, the lines are clean, the colors are all there. But it just... doesn't breathe. It feels flat, like a photograph. I've tried adding more texture with some rougher stones, even some broken glass, but it's not lifting it. Maybe it's the composition, or maybe I need to think about the 'andamento' differently. Any ideas on how to bring life into a mosaic that feels like it's just lying there?

I had a student today, nice woman, retired, picking up mosaic as a hobby. She's doing a landscape with those big square precut tiles from the craft store and she's setting them all in neat rows like bricks. Andamento, the flow of the lines, the direction the tesserae move, it's the whole conversation, right? It's what makes mosaic breathe instead of looking like a tile floor. I tried to explain why the river in her piece should follow the curve of the water, not the grid. She looked at me like I was speaking Ancient Greek. Which, fair. But here's the thing, I've been doing this long enough that I genuinely can't tell anymore if andamento matters to the average person looking at a mosaic, or if it's just us, the people who sit on floors cutting things, who care. Maybe everyone else just sees a pretty picture made of little squares. I still teach it of course. I'm stubborn. But sometimes I wonder if I'm passing on a religion instead of a technique. 😅

Three years. Three years this thing sat under my workbench wrapped in old sheets, half-cut, wrong, not working. It's a portrait of my yiayia's hands, she was a seamstress, those hands knew things, and I could not get the light right in the smalti. The gold kept coming out flat, like a coin, not like afternoon sun on old skin. Took it back out two months ago and finally saw what was wrong. Wrong andamento, wrong direction of the cuts. I'd been setting the tesserae like fabric folds instead of like hands. Had to pull half of it out and start again. Sent photos to the client this afternoon. She cried. So did I, a bit, alone in the studio with the cats looking at me like I'd lost it. Anyway. Sometimes the work needs to wait until you're ready for it. That's the thing nobody tells you.

I did the math on this one after it was already delivered. The stone alone cost €340, the smalti I had on hand but that's hours of cutting I don't account for. Six weeks of work, five days a week, roughly eight hours a day on the floor. Comes out to about €11 an hour before materials. Less than I'd pay someone to fix my plumbing. And the client was happy, the piece is genuinely good, I'm proud of it. That's the trap, right? You feel good about the work so you don't notice the numbers until later. I keep saying I'll calculate my rate upfront on the next one. Never do.

A woman came to the workshop today about a commission for her hallway, and she kept saying she wants it to look handmade. Not perfect, she said. A bit uneven, so you can tell a person did it. I showed her two panels. Same design, same stone. One I set with the tesserae following the curve of the drawing, tight, controlled, the way I was taught. The other I let breathe, wider gaps, a few pieces cut thicker because the stone was thick there and I did not fight it. She pointed at the first one and said yes, that one, it looks so natural. Forty minutes of explaining that the "natural" one is the one where I threw away nothing and hid all the work. The one she thought was handmade is the one where I was being a machine on purpose, because that is what the drawing needed. She took it well. Ordered the controlled version. But I have been thinking about it all afternoon. People want to see the hand, but only in the places they have decided the hand should be. The moment it shows up somewhere unexpected, a crooked line or a joint that does not close, it stops being charm and becomes a fault. Anyway. Grout tomorrow. The cats have been sleeping in the box of offcuts again and I have given up.

I quoted a 2m x 1.5m floor commission for €2,800 last spring. Client loved it, paid in two installments, no drama. Then I actually sat down and counted the hours after delivery. Between the cartoon, cutting and fitting the smalti, sourcing the stone, grouting, and two site visits, I was at 180 hours. That's €15.50 an hour before you subtract materials, which ran me about €400. So closer to €13 an hour for a piece that'll be walked on for decades. The killer is I couldn't have done it faster. That's the honest part nobody wants to say out loud. The work is the work. You can't rush setting a thousand tesserae and have it hold up in a floor. I keep going back and forth on whether to raise my rate for the next one and risk losing the commission, or stay where I am because at least the work comes in. My therapist friend says I should raise it. The landlord says I should raise it. My hands say they'd like to not be ruined by sixty for €13 an hour. Anyone here actually broken through on the price and kept the clients, or is this just what it is for hand-work?

Getting in is the story everyone tells. I want the other one. Mine: a small space took three pieces from me years back. Contract was a handshake. Then they wanted me to frame the mosaics in these awful gold frames, because "buyers need to see it's art." Mosaics. Gold frames. I said no, they hung them anyway propped against the wall like leftover tiles, and sold one. To this day I don't know if I'm angrier about the frames or the wall. So what's your version? The thing that happened after the yes that made you think, ah, this was not the right door. Or tell me I'm wrong and the gold frames were fine 🙏

Client saw a photo of the piece in progress, called me up, very cheerful, "Dimitra, why does it take you so long? Just fill the gaps quicker, nobody's going to look that close." That's the thing. They never look that close. That's exactly why they end up with a mosaic that's held together by hope and a prayer, lifting off the wall in three years, and then they call me back to fix it and act shocked at the price. No. I don't rush the setting. The gaps are the work, actually. The gaps are where the whole thing holds or falls. You want quick, buy a printed tile, it's thirty euros on Etsy. You want a mosaic that'll outlive your grandchildren, I place every piece and I don't rush a single one. He went quiet. I think he gets it now. Or he's off finding someone who'll give him quick. Either way, not my problem. My hands don't move faster for anyone, not even for money. Especially not for money, actually, I've learned that the hard way. 🙂

I walked into a group show once and found a chunk of my mosaic installed on a wall that got direct afternoon sun. Full glare, you couldn't see the color at all, just a flat blinding sheet. I stood there wondering if they'd even looked at it before hanging it. The curator meant well, it just never crossed anyone's mind. I said something, politely, and the fix was a curtain in five minutes. But it taught me to ask about light when a space takes my work. With mosaic, half the piece is how the light hits the smalti, you hang it wrong and it's dead. What's the worst way you've seen your work shown in a gallery? Bad light, wrong height, hung next to something that ate it whole? Tell me I'm not the only one who's had to fix it myself.

A gallery in Athens wanted my work a few years ago, but they wanted it on canvas. I work in mosaic, on board or panel, because that's what holds the stone. Canvas sags, the smalti pops off, it's not the medium. They said "we can't sell mosaic, it's too heavy for our wall system." I said well, that's what I make. And I didn't get the show. Walked away from it. Still don't know if I was right or just stubborn. Probably a bit of both. What's the line for you? The thing a gallery asked you to change that you wouldn't, or the thing you did change and it worked out?

So for about a year I was making these short videos, nothing fancy, just my phone propped against a grout bucket while I cut smalti or set tesserae. No music, no voiceover, just the sound of the hammer and the tile nippers. Sometimes ten seconds. Sometimes two minutes. I posted them because I liked the rhythm of them, but they'd get maybe 40 views. I kept doing it anyway because I'm stubborn and I had the footage. Last month a journalist from a design magazine in London was researching mosaic technique for an article on craft revival. She found my videos. Not my finished pieces, the raw ones, the ones nobody watched. She said they showed the actual process in a way her readers never see. So now there's a four-page spread about my work and I got paid for the photos and she quoted me saying nice things about patience and it's lovely. But the thing is, the algorithm was right. Those videos were dead content by every metric. They just happened to be exactly what one specific person needed on one specific day in another country. I don't know what the lesson is. Maybe that "what works" is sometimes just persistence aimed at nobody until the right somebody shows up. Or maybe it's luck dressed up as strategy. I can't tell yet.

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.

I stopped photographing my work the way galleries want. No seamless backdrop, no tripod, no little grey card for the white balance. I shoot it where it lives. On the studio floor with the tray of cut smalti still spilled beside it, the broom somewhere in frame, cement dust on everything. A gallery person told me last year it looked "unprofessional." Fine. The last three pieces I sold went to people who saw them on my kitchen table, next to a half-finished cup of coffee and a cat tail at the edge of the shot. Two of them told me it was the floor mess that made them trust it, that the polished shots looked like something from a catalogue and they stopped looking. Meanwhile the gallery took its own photos for the exhibition. Beautiful. Bright. Completely dead. A visitor walked straight past the actual mosaic on the wall, which is standing there glowing, and looked at the printed photo on the label card for forty seconds. I watched her do it. So now I'm sending out images with my knees in them and my father's old tile nippers lying there and I've made 2 sales this month from DMs about the background clutter, not the work. I don't fully understand it. I just know that the beautiful photo has stopped doing anything.

A gallery once asked me to make my mosaics "less Greek." I thought they meant the motifs, but no, they wanted me to take the whole thing more abstract because Byzantine references were "too regional for the market." I said no, obviously, and it ended fine, but I've never forgotten it. Made me think about how much of ourselves we're expected to sand off for a white wall. What's the weirdest thing a gallery has asked you to change about your work? The request that made you stop and go wait, what?

This one still makes me laugh. Years ago, a small gallery in Athens said yes to showing my work, then hit me with a list of costs I'd need to cover, including the wine for opening night. Like I was supposed to hand over cash so people could get drunk looking at my mosaics. I said no, and the show fell through. I know the line between a fair split and getting taken advantage of gets blurry sometimes, especially when you're starting out and just want someone to say yes. So where's the line for you? What's the thing a gallery asked for that made you walk, or should have made you walk?

For years my replies to enquiries were a paragraph about materials and then a number. Maybe one in six ever wrote back. Three months ago I changed one thing. Instead of the price I say: I'm setting glass until the 14th, then I'm free, do you want to come and see it on the floor before it's grouted. Nothing else. Twelve enquiries since. Nine of them got in the car. Seven commissions out of that. Same work, same prices, same photos on the page. I think people don't actually want a mosaic. They want to know what they're getting before they hand over 3,000 euros to a stranger with a hammer. A number in a message doesn't answer that. Standing over it in bad light in my workshop does. Two of them signed before they'd seen the whole thing, just the corner where the smalti catches. What annoys me is how obvious it is and how long it took me. I was treating a message like a quote, when it's really the first five minutes of a long job. It has made my week lumpier though. I'm a person again on Thursdays instead of a form. Some days I'd rather just cut stone and be nobody.