2. Test Tiles: On Tiles as a Generative Urban Artifact
Test tiles, photos, and research produced for group exhibition, UC Berkeley CED, 2024
* Awarded Branner Travel Fellowship
Ceramic tile has remained relatively unmodified for milenia, enduring cross-culturally as a construction material for its highly resistant nature and ease of maintenance. But tile is as regional as it is universal, which suggests that ceramic tile is a valuable building block for experimentation despite its standardization as a unit. For instance, tile may work to process particulate matter in the name of a more sustainable future, or it may serve to reclaim surfaces, providing new highly graphic contributions to the urban setting. Alternatively, tile can serve as a palimpsest of histories otherwise forgotten, demonstrating it can measure more than a planar dimension. This project examines quarries, manufacturing facilities, and surfaces in subways, bathrooms, plazas, and temples across the UK, Netherlands, Finland, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey. A series of test tiles were produced that seek to explore the technological, compositional, and social dimensions to tile and tiling; working to trace echoes of the past and remix residues of place.
Three ceramic test tiles (9 handmade tiles per piece) and six tile tracings.
Ceramic tiles from left to right:
Method
(b-mix+grog, cement board, mastic, grout, ruler marks)
Perhaps this interest in tile lies almost entirely in its method? How clean, how orderly… This panel explores the material process of making tile which involved rolling out tile, squaring it off, pressing, drying, firing, sanding, grinding, assembling, affixing. The accumulation of marks on a still porous surface remain present. Directly working with the object of thought as opposed to some intervening medium defines this panel as a constructive exercise.
“Civilizing”
(b-mix+grog, cement board, mastic, grout, ink transfer)
Unfolded into three dimensions and repeated in vertical and horizontal directions, the grid does more than define the space of architecture—it turns into architecture. This panel explores tile as an edge, an outline, a way to claim space and to discipline from an aerial perspective. The way the grid deals equally efficiently with both occupied and empty spaces brings about the notion of order, who’s order? The imagery on these tiles illustrates uncultivated pasture land between two centuriated colonies, land surveyor lots, and other cultural techniques of ruling spaces.
Coverage
(b-mix+grog, cement board, mastic, grout, ink transfer)
Tile needs a vacant armature, it needs to adhere to something. Shall we ask what it is covering? And what does it look like from behind? This panel explores the backsides of tile, impressed with the markings of Home Depot tile ready for installation. The scratches and inscriptions on the backside of tile account for its strength and formally represent its bonding ability.
Photos courtesy of the author.