Panoramic views of “Solstice Door” found-object mosaic art by Joe Moorman at Riverson Fine Art.

Panoramic views of “Solstice Door” found-object mosaic stele.

Panoramic views of “Solstice Door”

“Solstice Door” is a stele or monument stone made from collected artifacts embedded in concrete.

The Solstice Door mosaic is part of a larger installation of sacred space I am building. The mosaic will be positioned so that the last rays of the setting sun on summer solstice strike its face after passing through gaps in an astronolically aligned ring of monument stones. In other words, this mosaic is to be the target stone in an astronomical medicine wheel of the type at Stonehenge, but in this case not all the nodes will be marked with open-air stones. At least part of the portal should be in an alcove or dark chamber, where the beams shining into the chamber have to pass between aligned monument stones at the side of the ring. These open-air stones will have holes or notches through which the setting sun shines most fully at solstice.

The pictures above are from the studio/gallery area of my workshop right after the mosaic was completed.

I designed the core of the stone and its base to be extremely tough: a welded rebar frame wrapped in wire mesh and packed with polymer-modified concrete fortified with pea-gravel. The stele is probably strong enough to function as a structural element of a building, although you could never certify something made with welded rebar.

I’m sure I over engineer things because of my father. Everything he built could be used to stop a tank, including the tablesaw he welded up to build the house we lived in. His tablesaw was made from salvaged steel plate 1/2 inch thick and is heavy enough to function as an anvil and as an earthquake shelter.

I wrote and posted some instructions on how to build concrete sculptures at my glass mosaic tile website.

I also wrote some instructions on how to use thinset mortar for mosaic art projects.

Building doors for the Eldila. Holiness to the Lord.