A journey and new beginning
by Julie Ikler
It all started with a broken serving bowl. Not just any serving bowl. A pink and black ceramic serving bowl with black outlines of fish. A family heirloom and the only one of its kind. When our mother passed away, I was the lucky recipient of this bowl of memories, and it broke on my watch. I carefully picked up all the pieces and safely stored them away. Why? It was already broken! I had a notion to turn the broken bits into something else later. Something for each of my four other siblings to share, so we could each hold a piece of this memory bowl. What that something would be, I did not discover until some years later.
While growing up in Illinois, I nurtured my passion for art and photography. I went on to study graphic design, typography, photography and drawing at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. From there, I moved to the Bay Area of California and studied weaving and textile arts at the College of Marin in Kentfield. After relocating to Colorado in the early 80s, art and weaving took a back seat while I settled down and raised my three children.
Flash forward to 2013. My kids were grown, and my heart and hands were ready for some fresh creativity. It was then that I spotted a mosaics class in the BVSD Lifelong Learning catalog. After my first class, all of the broken bits and pieces I had been saving suddenly came together. I turned my sunroom into a studio and an old foosball table into my workbench. Mosaic art had found its way to me, and I to it.
My passion for making something beautiful out of something broken has turned into both a very satisfying art form and a creative way to recycle and repurpose. And the pink and black serving bowl? The day it fell off the shelf and broke was not an ending, but a beginning. It’s now magically finding its way into a number of mosaics. Who knew how something broken could also become a blessing.