Family Totem

When I was a little girl, my parents purchased a lithograph of a mask by the artist Ben Shahn. Hanging on a wall in the living room, it was our constant, benevolent witness, surveying our house: the mess, the neglect, the circus of people and animals, the passions and cruelties, the gifts and talents (encouraged or ignored), the hilarity, the yearnings, the needs unmet, the plants that died, the creatures hidden in murky water, and piles and piles of stuff growing higher and higher.
At some point, I began to make a series of mosaics of the mask, so that each of us siblings could have a family totem of our own. I see this piece as a tribute to my siblings, and to the way a piece of art was imbued with an emanating force and aliveness so powerful that it, too, became a member of our family.
Materials: vitreous glass and ceramic tile on a galvanized chimney cap, with water spout valves and wire.