Near Swaffham
PE37 8AG
Emma is a professional mosaicist. She tells tales of the bowler-hatted mosaic workers of Islington, being the only woman worker in a busy German shipyard, choosing colour from glass libraries in Venice, and visiting mosaic graves of workers in Friuli.
Her talk encompasses geology, history, fine art, rock n roll and a personal tale of making mosaics on an architectural scale for clients worldwide.
Emma Biggs, Mosaic artist
Emma Biggs has been a professional mosaicist for over 30 years. She has produced mosaics for Sir Terence Conran, Canary Wharf, Westminster Cathedral, the Buraimi mosque in Oman, a number of penthouses in New York, along with restaurants in London, Hamburg, Bermuda and Dublin. Her work has been installed on trains, cruise ships and sailing boats, and her architectural-scale public art projects in Sheffield and Gosport have won awards.Emma’s mosaic, ‘Made in England,’ which memorialises the potteries of Stoke on Trent through the icons and marks on the backs of plates, some hundreds of years old, is on permanent display in the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.
Her clients include boxers, pop stars and prime ministers. In 1987, Emma watched a TV programme about the Italian community in the UK, only five minutes of which was about migrant mosaicists, but it was enough to start her career in this medium. Who would have thought mosaic could be a productive line of work in the twentieth century? She set up Mosaic Workshop later that year, a busy studio in Holloway, North London, producing mosaic pavements and murals. The studio ran courses and taught a generation of mosaicists, as well as selling them the materials to use. It attracted characters as diverse as local schoolteachers, Catholic monks, professional cake makers and a spattering of locals and celebrities like Suggs from Madness, comedian Liza Tarbuck, designer Kaffe Fassett and Grand Design’s Kevin McCloud. Emma’s busy courses, together with a number of books she co-authored with mosaic partner Tessa Hunkin, helped generate a worldwide vogue for mosaic. She has been invited to lecture on the subject internationally and is known for an original approach to colour and pattern.
Emma took a circuitous route to success. When young, she was interested in art, and studied Fine Art at Leeds University, but chose Museum Studies rather than Painting. When she graduated she worked as assistant to designer Vivienne Westwood, and went on to co-found a tour management company working with pop groups. Clients included Public Image Limited, Modern Romance, ABC, Propaganda and Aswad. But the rock life wasn’t for her and watching that Italian TV programme changed her life.
In 1996 Emma met Matthew Collings. They started to collaborate making abstract geometrical paintings. They are known as Biggs & Collings and are represented by London’s Vigo Gallery. They exhibit regularly and have shown in the UK, USA and Australia. Their paintings are in public and private collections.
After 22 years in London Emma moved to Norfolk. There, she and Collings found generous studio space for both mosaics and paintings. Last year (alongside projects in Liverpool, Switzerland, Cambridge and Hamburg) she fabricated two enormous mosaic panels based on Biggs & Collings designs, for the façade of the Fruit & Wool Exchange in Spitalfields, London.
emma@emmabiggsmosaic.net
www.emmabiggsmosaic.net
https://www.instagram.com/emma.biggs
https://a-mosaic-life.com