Barsham Sun Mosaic

A Commission for Radiant Memory and Living Joy

In June 2025, Mosaic Memories was commissioned to create a floor mosaic rooting both heritage and joy within a family home. The brief harked toward the Albion Fairs of the 1970s, when East Anglian fields came alive with theatre, music, and medieval revival. The stylised Sun, surviving here most vividly on a T-shirt, was chosen as the motif. Despite attempts to discover and acknowledge its original artist, they sadly remain unknown. This commission has therefore become both a homage and a remembrance, marking the half-centenary since those gatherings.

Carolyn’s redesign transformed this fragment of festival memory into a bold, enduring artwork. Realised as a 1.5-metre octagon in glass and encaustic cement tile, the piece required careful staging, durable adhesives, and precision cutting to ensure it would weather seasons and years to come. Each tessera cut and set to echo the rhythm of the emblem, the process unfolding as an exercise in art, design, patience, and celebration.

The Sun is shown with radiant curling rays, its face reimagined with a playful wink, a touch requested by the commissioners and interpreted through Carolyn’s hand. This detail gives the mosaic extra character and warmth, inviting a joie de vivre into the life of the young family who now live with it daily. With shifting light, the work reveals changing moods — bright at noon, glowing at dusk, playful and knowing, anchoring itself as both art object and lived presence.

Unveiled at a patio party in the August, the Barsham Sun Mosaic was warmly received. Now a centrepiece of home and garden, it stands as an example of Carolyn’s art and vision: a revival of memory, and a celebration of enduring design, skill, and creativity.