Glass River: an art glass mosaic by Tuck Contreras

for featured artist
Tuck Contreras

GLASS MOSAIC PROJECTS:

* Glass River

Grape Cluster Mosaic for Dry Hollow Vineyards

project: Glass River

Glass River. A 14-foot-long, glass-and-stone mosaic, inset in the plastered wall above the fireplace of an Oregon home.

Glass River. Another view showing the complicated installation. The 14-foot-long mosaic wraps around one corner of the wall.

Tuck’s Glass River was commissioned for clients who have wheat-farmed for years up by the mouth of the Deschutes River, where it joins with the Columbia River near The Dalles in Oregon.

To honor her clients’ experience working this land and their intimate knowledge of the area, Tuck chose to artistically reproduce a 55-mile section of Oregon’s Columbia River extending northeast of where it is fed by the tributary John Day River (about 36 miles from The Dalles; see the upper righthand corner of the Glass River mosaic) to the southwest, just past the port city of Hood River, Oregon, at the foot of Mount Hood (see the lower left section of Glass River where the mosaic wraps around the wall).

The resulting serpentine Glass River mosaic, made of art glass and stone, is 14 feet long and is installed in an interior wall of the clients’ home, afterwards finished by Tuck with Venetian plaster.

Tuck took her starting bird’s-eye view of the desired section of the Columbia River from Google Earth. According to Tuck, “google has great ways of showing the gorge so i spent alot of time looking at different ways of seeing the river.” Tuck then re-worked her Google views for the installation site, resizing and tilting her composite map of the river to perfectly fit the space around the fireplace, as shown in the pictures.

As always, her design takes full advantage of the play of ambient light in the room, using this in creative ways to accentuate the unique properties of the colored art glass and stone. The result is an artist’s vision of the Columbia worthy of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus of Epheseus (c.540–c.475 BCE), who once famously observed: “One can not step twice into the same river.”

Comments Tuck: “For me, it’s all about the way the light keeps changing the art glass and making it appear to move and change. It has to be seen in person and over time. It never looks the same; the light is always changing.”

Tuck completed and installed Glass River for her clients in Summer 2008.

Glass River detail. Close-up view of left edge of the installed piece, before plastering.

Glass River detail. Close-up view of wall-corner section, before plastering.

Glass River detail. Close-up view of a section combining glass and stone (agates, which represent land masses in the river), before plastering.

Glass River detail. Another close-up view of a section combining art glass and stone, before plastering.

Glass River, after plastering. Tuck applied her own mix of Venetian plaster to the wall, and rimmed the entire span of the inset glass river with polished black basalt pebbles (representing the surrounding Columbia River Gorge).

Glass River, after plastering. Another view of the finished piece, which co-ordinates well with the black granite mantle and hearth for the brick fireplace.

Glass River, after plastering. A close-up view of the tricky corner section of the wall.

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project: Glass River