In Patricia Warman’s garden in Carbondale, I walk through the back gate. She opened her whole backyard for people to come around and walk through. And her garden is luscious: the colors are bright; the plants are tall and full. It is a sanctuary in here. And she has mosaics every which way. Patricia explained how she came to be a mosaic artist.
“All by accident! I am a gardener. I love gardening, and I don’t really have the talents to be able to paint or sculpt and do some of the wonderful art that people do. But mosaic work is very free form, and you don’t have to follow patterns - like stained glass, so meticulous and exact - whereas mosaics, well, as I said, it’s free form. So that’s how I started doing the mosaics.”
Patricia does more than mosaics. If you pass her home, you might wonder, what’s hanging from those trees? Bicycle wheels with glass?
“I was visiting my sister back in Michigan, and in her garden was a bicycle wheel, and I fell in love with the bicycle wheel.”
Upon returning to Carbondale, she visited the 3rd Street Center bike shop, Carbondale Bike Project. She picked up the unusable wheels that couldn’t be calibrated for the bikes and were being thrown away.
“They were fun,” Patricia notes, “and these have been hanging in this yard for at least 12 or 13 years, and they hang year-round, so they weather well.”
Lying next to her, made of wire and porcelain plates, is what she calls an ever-blooming flower. An injury led her to switch from mosaic tiles to wire leaves.
“I blew out this joint trimming lilacs in the backyard. And at the time, I couldn’t use my left hand because of the injury. So I started doing these because you have to bend wire and manipulate it. And so that’s how I started the ever blooming flowers. It was therapy to get the motion back in this hand.”
Walking through this garden, I am so grateful to see into Patricia’s world and get to know her, her story, and see her art that normally would be passed right by.
“I love to share my garden, I love it,” Patricia said as she waved goodbye to folks leaving her home.
If you walk through Crystal Circle, you may come across Patricia Warman’s garden with trees filled with glistening bike wheels, mosaic tiled paths, porcelain plate flowers, and her infectious love for art and gardening.
