Seed — Mosaic Cartoon Abstract Character, Design School, Helsinki

The school teaches three hundred students a year how to make things, and they wanted a sculpture that would argue a position rather than decorate a courtyard. Their position: that a form is not finished until somebody else has read something into it.

The brief

A character, about 2.6 m, with no identity. Two eyes and a posture, and nothing else that could be named. Then the surface had to be a mosaic, and the mosaic had to be assembled from pieces no two of which matched.

Why mosaic is the right material for this argument

A mosaic is made of differences. Every tessera is cut by hand, so every one is a different shape, a slightly different colour and set at a slightly different angle. The image that emerges is a consensus between thousands of imperfect pieces, which is more or less exactly what a school is.

Roughly 4,100 pieces across the piece, cut into quadrilaterals between 30 and 50 mm at this scale, laid with a consistent 4 mm gap and each one rotated a few degrees off the local grid. Nothing on the surface lines up with anything else.

The character, and where it stops

Two eyes, an egg-shaped head, one rounded body, two stubby arms, a slight forward lean. That is the entire specification, and we held to it through eight rounds of review because the temptation to add a nose, a mouth or a hat was constant.

The lean is what makes it a character rather than an object. It is four degrees off vertical, forward and very slightly to the left, and it reads as attention.

What the tessera cannot do is resolve small features, so the two eyes are the only places on the whole piece where the mosaic grid is broken: each eye is a single flat inlaid shape set level with the surrounding tesserae, with no grout around it at all.

On the forecourt

It stands at 2.6 m near the main entrance, on a plain concrete base. The school runs a first-year exercise in which students draw the character from memory after seeing it once, and the drawings are displayed on the wall behind it. No two have ever been the same, which the school describes as the whole point of the piece arriving ahead of schedule.