PIECES OF ART
Published on June 2, 2001
BYLINE:    MEG McCONAHEY

Nancy Nicks wept on the long walk downstairs after last September's earthquake rattled her Napa Valley home like a cup of dice.

She didn't have to see the damage. She knew what she would find. An old cabinet with insecure latches spilled its contents of precious Baccarat crystal, Wedgwood and Imari china -- heirlooms Nicks had spent 30 years collecting.

Treasured antique collectibles worth perhaps $15,000 lay scattered in shards on the floor.

Although everything was irretrievably broken -- an estimate for restoring one bowl was $500 -- Nicks said she just couldn't bring herself to throw it away, especially the blue, white, orange and gilt Imari, pieces she had triumphantly bought for a song or paid dearly for at auction, most pieces dating back to the 19th century. Even if insurance had covered the loss, which it didn't, the lost china was not anything that could be reordered from the Williams-Sonoma catalog.

"I just didn't want to forget it," the Napa collector said. "I'm a big memorializer of things. And I wanted something my children could have."

So Nicks carefully picked up and bagged the pieces and set out to find an artist who could create something beautiful from the broken remains of her prized collection. Her search led her to the Sonoma studio of Angela Casazza, a mosaic artist skilled in the emerging folk art of "pique-assiette" or picassiette.

Translated literally, it roughly means "stolen plate." And it all goes back to gifted French eccentric Raymond Isidore, who devoted 26 years to covering every conceivable surface of his Chartres home with mosaics assembled from broken pottery and porcelain and glass.

"I went for a walk in the fields and it was then that I saw by chance little bits of broken glass, fragments of china, broken crockery. I gathered them together, without any precise intention, for their colors and their sparkle," the foundry worker and road crewman wrote.

"I picked out the good stuff and threw away the bad. I piled them up in a corner of the garden. Eventually the idea came to me to make a mosaic of them to decorate the house."

From 1938 to 1962, just two years before his death, Isidore indulged his magnificent obsession, covering outside walls, courtyards, a chapel, a summerhouse, a garden and finally his own tomb, with broken pottery and glass, and earning himself the mocking nickname of Picassiette, or the Picasso of Plates.

Eventually, intrigued townsfolk began bringing him their toss-aways, which he turned into a historic monument that enthusiasts would argue rivals the stained glass in the nearby Chartres cathedral.

Folk art

Over the past 50 years, other artists picked up on the idea of recycling the detritus of modern civilization, elevating Isidore's peculiar work into an international folk art now known as pique-assiette.

Increasingly, people are taking up the art or commissioning a growing niche of mosaic artists like Casazza, to create custom table-tops, frames, bowls, garden sculptures, bird baths, flower pots. You name it and it probably can be covered with colorful mosaics of smashed pottery, tile, stones, glass, seashells.

For Nicks, Casazza created a bowl with the classic colors and pattern composition of Imari, but reconfigured into a piece with a distinctively modern look.

"It can just be decorative and fun, or it can very meaningful and therapeutic," says Casazza, who like others who have taken up the art, was a trained tile setter.

Working out of a studio behind her Sonoma home, a jumble of tchotchkes, tiles, old plates, kitchy statues and other found trash and garage sale scores that she draws upon as source material, Casazza has found a way to combine her contracting skills with her training and talent as as artist. She studied at both the California College of Arts and Crafts and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Casazza was inspired by the Watts Towers, the 100-foot mosaic sculptures of found objects by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia that rise as a cultural monument out of the poverty of South Central L.A. Her one-of-a-kind mosaics, well within the pique-assiette tradition, combine shards, as she describes it, into "intricate patterns of shimmering surfaces, and the fragments are infused with renewed spirit."

These patterns can be placed on a variety of surfaces: a metal table, inlaid with broken Chinese porcelain bowls and yellow bathroom tile from the '40s into serpentine shapes reminiscent of the Yin and Yang; a large cracked Tunisian pot recovered from a shipwreck is given new life, covered with tiles, crockery, rims of dishes ... in a cavalcade of colors and shapes that capture the light.

"It's very tactile, very approachable," she says of her folk art of found objects. "Children can touch it."

Nicks takes great consolation in the 12-inch shallow bowl Casazza created and that is now a vessel for her for memories.

"She's taken a little cup and tipped it over and left it broken. If you look inside, the cup handle is sticking up," she said.

"She took a great fish pattern and mounted it as though it was swimming across the dish. "Like Isidore in Northern France, North Bay mosaic artists have become experts at scrounging materials. Custom tilemakers, potters and people with broken pottery to share, often show up bearing gifts."

Casazza's materials range from junky glass knickknacks and cups picked up at garage sales, to the seconds and broken pieces of high end artists like Melissa Brounel, whose Ashleigh Collection plates can command hundreds of dollars -- unbroken of course.

Surprise, uncertainty

She works almost on instinct, letting her creativity carry her with a degree of surprise and uncertainty until the very end. The art gives her a new perspective on everyday objects. And nothing is so precious it can't be broken to create something else of beauty.

"I'm hunting for things until the last minute -- looking and searching through my stuff or going out to yard sales," she said. "It makes it exciting for me because every piece is different and I don't know where it will go until it's close to done. "

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