| Edite Cunha prefers her pottery shattered and reassembled into patterns. |
The keepsake plate - pale blue, with a Prince Charming character in breeches beaming from the center - struck Edite Cunha as terribly ugly. She liked it much better after she lifted her hammer and smashed it to pieces. And now she appreciates it even more: As the focal point of one of her mosaic-encrusted garden benches, the shards have taken on an air of antiquity and mystery that the intact plate couldn't muster.
This kind of transformation is a hallmark of Cunha's world of mosaic design, where a tacky parrot figurine finds a new calling as the whimsical centerpiece of a birdbath or, in the tradition of Victorian-era memory ware, a beloved but chipped tea set is born again as an urn.
"I usually don't know what things are going to look like," says Cunha. Her improvisational process begins with a glance around her studio in the Western Massachusetts town of Hawley. There, cupboards and boxes overflow with cracked dinnerware, china chickens, Virgin Mary statues, tiles, and vases. "Things speak to me," she says.
Rather than geometric design, Cunha leans toward erratic shapes and a crazy-quilt assemblage. Visitors who had pictured her hurling plates at a wall in her studio have been disappointed to find her method more controlled: She covers each piece with cloth and breaks it apart with a few decisive raps. Next she uses mortar to affix the shards to a base; garden ornaments she buys wholesale, end tables can come from junk shops. Small pieces, such as a sparrow-size birdhouse, can take several hours to cover; after that, Cunha spends a few more hours grouting and polishing. She calls her creations Smashing China and sells them from her Web site () as well as at Art Inside in Shelburne Falls, Weeds in Northampton, and Fiona's Porch in York, Maine.
Just two years ago, Cunha was envisioning a future as a novelist. The year-old writer and literacy teacher had quit her day job to finish a novel when she stumbled onto a book about the art of this kind of mosaic, called picassiette. A native of Portugal, Cunha had spent her childhood collecting potsherds and wandering through tiled gardens; as an adult, she instinctively saved all of her chipped china. The how-to book hit her like lightning.
"My husband was in the next room saying, 'What's going on in there?' " recalls Cunha, who says she devoured the book in one sitting. The next day, she bought materials at a hardware store and visited antique shops, begging for broken dishes. "Within a week, I wanted to cover buildings with this stuff."
She's still working on the novel - when she has time. "This is a lot like writing to me," says Cunha. "It's piece by piece, excruciating attention to detail. What I get from this is immediate gratification."