“Dragon of the Earth” © 2014

“Dragon of the Earth” is a mosaic mural I designed and created for the Josiah Quincy School and BCYF Community Center in Boston, dedicated to the importance of caring for our environment.   This project involved over 100 students from the Josiah Quincy School in the Chinatown neighborhood of Boston.  The majority of this project was funded through Edvestors, which is a nonprofit that works to increase access to arts education in Boston public schools.  Edvestors provided me with a year long grant to teach art and art history to students at the Josiah Quincy School.  In each year of my Edvestors funded programs, I created a permanent work of public art involving my students.  For this particular project, I raised money for the materials online and brought the school’s rarely used, 30 year old kiln (that was sitting idle in a storage closet for over 25 years) back to life.   That kiln is still in use to this day.

I taught my students how to create relief sculptures in clay and after completing several minor projects, I then asked them to design a relief tile that would represent an aspect of nature and our environment that they loved and wanted to see preserved and protected.  I would then fire this relief tile in the kiln, the students would paint them, and I would fire them again.  Then I took all the tiles, including one that I made, and cemented them all together onto a silhouette of a dragon that I cut out from plywood.  The  relief tiles served as “messages” to the dragon, in a bid to encourage the protection and preservation of many different aspects of our natural world.

As one of the four creatures of the world’s directions, the dragon is an ancient and important Chinese symbol and of the 12 creatures of the Chinese Zodiac.  A dragon has the power to bring rain to dry lands and bring forth abundance, relief, and good fortune.  The dragon is also a symbol of Mother Nature, one of the most important forces on Earth.