Glass Mosaic by Jamelie Hassan in Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery Silent Auction

1.618, Glass tile mosaic on plywood, 2020

Jamelie Hassan has contributed a recent glass tile mosaic, "1.618", to Future Vison silent auction for the KWAG. Visit the auction page here. Online bidding deadline began Nov. 2 and ends on December 11, 2020 at noon.

Artist statement
I have had a lifelong interest in the art of mosaics and have done research on this ancient art in museum collections in France, Italy, Spain, Portugual, North Africa and throughout the Middle East. Technically, I began to learn this process through a workshop lead by Indigenous artist Brenda Collins to create a collaborative mosaic tile work of a Medicine Wheel with my family. Previously, I had attended a wampum workshop with Brenda and she had added mosaic tile workshops to her skills.

Several of my first glass mosaic tile artworks incorporated common expressions in Arabic Kufic-style script. I then moved to mathematical concepts as a means to reference our relationship in Western culture to Arabic number and mathematical systems. The origin of the Fibonaccio number system and the golden mean 1.618 is from Arabic - Indian concepts of mathematics yet this origin has been erased or absent from common knowledge. Scholars from North Africa and the Middle East such as al- Khwarizmi whose name was given to the term algorithm (ca. 825 C.E.) influenced Fiboncci but the 13 th century mathematician from Pisa is the individual that is identified with this beautiful and revolutionary concept and its relationship to nature.