Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings

Scarlet Thread

Glass Mosaics

3980mm x 4380mm

 Before their partnership as artists began, Matthew Collings was well known as an art critic, broadcaster, writer and painter. Emma Biggs was a leading mosaic artist. A joint interest in the history of visual art was the source of their collaboration.

Their collaborative work deals with an issue that is simple to describe but complicated to realise: making beauty with severely limited abstract means.   The function of their network of diamond shapes is to order colour until it produces a structural space, one that is like observable reality, but without a recognisable image.

 The title of the mosaic artwork on the redeveloped Fruit and Wool Exchange comes from a quote in Genesis about a new born baby whose hand grasps a scarlet thread.

The artists always take their titles from Genesis.  Not religious sense but the book of Genesis claims to be about everything that is, ultimate origins.

The initial colour idea came from the saturated high colours of fruit, offset by the earthy colours of sheep. (The Fruit and Wool Building.)