PHOTOS Gavin Elder, Liza Grobler and Half Square WORDS Alma Viviers
Cape Town-based visual artist Liza Grobler created a Half Square feature wall for a Nando’s restaurant in Chicago.
Artist Liza Grobler is anything but a material monogamist. To make her art, she uses everything from pipe cleaners to performance, from crochet to multimedia. Besides a passion for the tactile quality of materials, much of her work is driven by a fascination with the idea of small units that are replicated over and over to produce something unexpected when added together. This makes her just the person to translate her work into the Half Square format of small triangular ceramic tiles to produce a large-scale relief artwork using 4,032 ceramic tiles for the West Loop Nando’s restaurant in Chicago.
Liza’s artwork, Honeydew, is the fourth Half Square design she has produced. It is based on a photograph of her Honey Drops installation at the Nirox Foundation’s Winter Sculpture Show 2014. Because her site-specific installations are often temporary, she uses photography to document the work, and these photos become the springboard for other works, such as Honeydew.
Liza pixelates the image using Photoshop. “Working with half squares or triangles is interesting in that it abstracts your work in a whole new way,” she says. “I think of it as working with pixels, although the triangles have a different effect than squares. It might seem contradictory, but they produce both geometric and organic shapes.”
The next step is to make the small triangular tiles, paying close attention to perfecting the hues. Liza has the help of Karen Kotzé, ceramic studio manager at Yellowwoods Art, who oversees the making, glazing and firing process.
Once the tiles have been fired, they start the process of packing them out in the design. “Because the panels are so big,” Liza says, “we do it on the floor and I even climb up a ladder to view the design from above and to direct changes to the position of the tiles based on the overall coherence of the image.”
Watch Liza Grobler’s mural come to life here.
