The Healing Power of Mosaic

by Karen Yvonne Hamilton, 2025

I fell in love with mosaic after reading the great poet, Walt Whitmans’ book Specimen Days. Whitman says of his autobiography,

“If I do it at all I must delay no longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of diary-jottings…all bundled up and tied by a big string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this day, this hour…to go home, untie the bundle, reel out diary-scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another, into print-pages, and let the melange’s lackings and wants of connection take care of themselves…At any rate I obey my happy hour’s command, which seems curiously imperative. May-be, if don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.”

 – Walt Whitman in Specimen Days

This “fragmentary book” reminded of one of my favorite words – tesserae. Tesserae means “a small block of stone, tile, glass, or other material used in the construction of a mosaic.” A fragment. Whitman used the tesserae of his life to create his life as a book. And is our life not made up of tesserae? We create a mosaic of our lives with our art.

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I’ve dabbled with mosaic work before. My very first mosaic leaves much to be desired, but it was a lesson. It is very rough, but I was in heaven making it. It felt right at the time.

In 1999, I used an old dining room table that I had gotten from my parents to make a large backgammon board. The table was one of those made of wrought iron and topped with a large piece of glass. The glass was long gone, so I settled a large piece of wood into it. I then used tiles to create a backgammon board. Somewhere there is a photo of it, but I haven’t found the photo yet. The table ended up sold.

My favorite thing to do is to take broken pieces and repurpose them. My early pieces had their problems. Again, learning. My garden table was interrupted because we moved and it got left behind. My 2nd backgammon table, I forgot to alternate the colors of the points.

Now I am learning to work with glass, which is a challenge I am enjoying. I am learning to cut glass, grind glass, and consider how the pieces work together.

My suggestion is to start small. I tend to jump head on into large projects, which is just how my mind works. The project I am working on now is the size of an end table. I am learning much about glass cutting in the process. As you can see from it’s current state, I have made quite a few mistakes in my cutting. I did use a pattern, but glass has its own agenda sometimes (often). ha ha

I may never be a great artist, but that is not what I aspire to anyway.

The process is the healing space.

I look for ‘the spark’ that my father always encouraged me to find. Once you find your ‘spark,’ you can get through anything!