Trevor Creighton, projects co-ordinator gives an update on the progress of our mosaic project...We have taken some big strides in week 2. In the picture below you can see Emily, Maria and Jess hard at work finishing off the ‘second feature’ in our mosaic: concentric rings of black, white and red tesserae encircling the central ‘flower’ motif. It grows and grows!
The job is still rather painstaking but we hope it will speed up as we go. One sticking point – literally – has been the mortar we have been using to bed our tesserae in – and ‘stick’ the thing to the floor! We are about to start working with a revised mortar, much closer to the ‘Roman’ original and based on quicklime. It’s not as strong as the mortar we have been using but, hopefully, it’s a lot easier to work with.
A huge thank you must, again, go to all of the people involved in the project. A special thanks to Arthur for making the timber formers we are using to hold the mortar in place as it sets.