It seems a number people are trying new things to help pass all the time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But a Corner Brook woman is keeping calm and carrying on with a pastime that’s served her for several years now.
Karin Galliott O’Keeffe is known to many on the west coast as the former manager of the Arts and Culture Centre in Corner Brook, a position from which she retired in March 2014.
Now, instead of bringing someone else’s art to the stage, she’s creating her own, in the form of mosaics made from glass and tile.
“I think mosaics are a little bit like us. They’re little pieces that come together,” she said.
Karin Galliott O’Keeffe creates most of her mosaic art as gifts for friends or by special request. (Bernice Hillier/CBC)
Galliott O’Keeffe said her interest in mosaics began at the beach.
She’d pick up bits of beach glass and arrange them to form shapes such as flowers, which she then glued onto wood to create pictures.
Art that sprouts up
Galliott O’Keeffe is an avid gardener, an activity she can only enjoy outdoors for part of the year in Newfoundland.
So mosaic art gives her a way to work on her garden even in the winter, as she’s made a bird bath and designs on patio stones.
“I did one that was a teapot, for my mom, who loved her cup of tea,” said Galliott O’Keeffe.
“And then I did another one with the masks, comedy and tragedy. So a nod to my work at the [Arts and Culture] Centre.”
“I think mosaics are a little bit like us. They’re little pieces that come together.”<br><br>Karin Galliot O’Keefe is keeping busy creating mosaics from glass and tile. It’s an artform she’s enjoyed for years, but especially now that she’s largely cooped up indoors (sound familiar?). <a href=”https://t.co/BrNygqyK67”>pic.twitter.com/BrNygqyK67</a>
Her latest project for the garden is an old window frame, which has a different Alice in Wonderland-inspired mosaic in each pane of glass.
One person’s trash
Galliott O’Keeffe said making mosaics is also a chance to repurpose things that might otherwise have ended up in a landfill.
An old teacup or a few spare tiles will never go astray in her studio.
“I upcycle old dishes that I find at yard sales and in thrift stores, or people give them to me because they don’t need them anymore,” said Galliott O’Keeffe.
Karin Galliott O’Keeffe also sometimes creates 3D glass art by re-purposing old glassware. (Bernice Hillier/CBC)
Good therapy
Galliott O’Keeffe suggests it’s not just the process of creating something new that can be helpful.
She said breaking apart her found items of glassware and tile can be beneficial, too, in a cathartic sort of way.
“Breaking dishes is very therapeutic, I can tell you,” she said. “And then you can cut them into the pieces that you need.”
Even now, during COVID-19, Galliott O’Keeffe goes for a walk outdoors on most days but, early on in her retirement, she found that the winters were long, and she needed something out of the weather to help occupy her time.
This window pane mosaic based on Alice in Wonderland is one of Karin Galliott O’Keeffe’s latest creations. It will be placed in her garden this summer. (Bernice Hillier/CBC)
“I’m not a cold weather person. I love being inside, being cosy,” she said.
“So when the sun is not shining and it’s grey, which it is here most of the time in the winter, I’m here in my studio, where it’s warm, and I’m clicking away.”
She said it’s not unusual for her to go to her studio to work on a project, and then come out hours later, not realizing how much time had passed.
“It’s like there’s some sort of different time zone in this room, and I love it,” she said.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
