I’m Olivia, a third year English and Creative Writing student. Over summer, I took part in the Collaborative Research Internship “From Mosaics to Pixels: Eduardo Paolozzi in the Midlands” with project lead Dorothy Butchard, PHD student Niall Gallen, and two other interns, Grace, and Jen. As a team, our goal was to research and produce content about the incredible artist Eduardo Paolozzi. Paolozzi is a famous Scottish-Italian multiform artist best known for his mosaics at Tottenham Court Road tube station, his sculptures around Euston, and his hundreds of colourful prints, such as ‘Wittgenstein in New York’. Whilst exploring these incredible works, our central mission was to digitalise information about his lesser-known project in the Midlands, the mosaics in Redditch Kingfisher shopping centre. The mosaics were designed and built in 1983 by Paolozzi specifically for the shopping centre, where they still sit proudly in 2023. Despite their grandeur, there is a serious lack of acknowledgment of them in literature about Paolozzi. It’s unclear whether this is because they are a project from later in his life, or if they are simply outshone by the very popular TCR station mosaics, or just lost in the literature.
Once the project goals had been explained to us, Grace, Jen, and I set out to research as much as we could to understand Paolozzi as a person and an artist. For the first few weeks, we settled into chairs in the main campus, Barber fine arts and Selly Oak libraries. Each of us were naturally drawn to different parts of our research. Grace focused on the planning and construction of the mosaics, Jen explored the friendships he made and how they influenced his work, and I investigated his complicated childhood and the scrapbooking hobby that influenced his adult collage work. Once we had read as much as we could, we set out to write articles for the project website, https://mosaicstopixels.uk/. With the support of Dorothy and Niall, we each found an angle that was engaging and accessible to the residents of Redditch and admirers of the mosaics. In my own article, I worked to depict a clear image of his childhood, from his parents, to the traumas he experienced as an Italian immigrant in Scotland during World War II, to how art and collage was integral to his interests from a young age. I found that the more I understood his early life, and the clearer I could see where his passions and talent stemmed from, the more appreciation I had for his artwork, including the mosaics. I found references all over the place that tied together images form his childhood with images in his mosaics, such as icons from cigarette cards (which he collected as a child) intertwined into the tiles of the Redditch piece.
Most notably, taking such a deep delve into Paolozzi connected me to art more deeply than I had before. In studying his life and influences, I became mesmerised by the mosaics when we saw them in person. Knowing that a whole life influenced the precise outcome of the tiles added more depth than I could imagine. In our work to share the art with the Redditch community through our articles and a Heritage Week event in the shopping centre, I left the internship feeling fulfilled, inspired, and confident.
Olivia Brass, BA English and Creative Writing