Scilla Alvarado

I am a mosaicist from a very mixed heritage.  My father was a German Jewish refugee and my mother was from an English, Welsh and Indian heritage. Little wonder my life has, as long as I can remember, always taken a very multi-cultural path, with a strong sense of values - working for justice, healing and acceptance of difference. These led me into a career path in education, psychotherapy, shamanic practice and constellations facilitation and now creating mosaics and facilitating others’ creativity. 

I have lived between London and Luxor, Egypt for over 24 years.  My arrival in Egypt came at the end of a deeply traumatic year - ending of a marriage, deaths of two friends and one of my brothers and redundancy as a result of cuts in education.  Embracing my vulnerability I turned to therapy to help me through and my eyes were opened to parts of myself I had pushed into the shadows.  Significantly my creativity was one of those parts and so I entered the world of mosaics as the path to reconnecting.  Inspired by my healing experience I started training as a therapist.  I now muse how related the mosaicking and healing processes are, both bringing broken or disparate pieces together to create a more meaningful, satisfying and integrated whole.

Some of my works are about expressing an emotion, acknowledging trauma, healing, enjoying a memory, remembering significant deaths in my life, making a political statement or just enjoying an abstract design or the beauty of a geometrical design.  I take varying approaches to my work.  Sometimes intuitively I am attracted to playing with particular materials or colours and during the process or on completion the piece holds a meaning for me.  Or I start with an issue, or memory, or an emotion I want to express and then search for the materials and colours that fit for me. There are also times when I create an abstract design for the sake of enjoying colour and materials.  My mixed heritage and adventurous, traveling spirit has led me to draw on many different traditional and cultural forms of art often using materials collected on my travels, from nature and everyday objects to express what I need to communicate about trauma, emotions, injustice, healing and vision. 

I have had no formal art training although have taken workshops from inspiring mosaicists such as Emma Biggs, Nathalie Vin, Arianna Putin, David Feuerstein and Rachel Davies. As my life in Egypt drew me into the sacred world of Islamic pattern with its beauty of geometry, balance and symmetry and the flow of Arabic calligraphy I have also enjoyed workshops at the Art of Islamic Pattern, The Princes School of Traditional Arts and the British Arabic Centre.