MOSAIC ARTIST - LYNLEY JAKOWYNA
A Painter’s Eye, a Weaver’s Hand, a Mosaicist’s Touch
FINDING A NEW LANGUAGE
For Lynley Jakowyna, mosaic became a way back into creative expression after a long period away from making. Her first artistic language had been scenic weaving, a practice she developed into a successful body of work before repetitive strain injury forced her to stop.
Years later, when she returned to creative practice, she began experimenting with what she describes as “smash and stick” mosaic. The connection was immediate. Like weaving, mosaic offered a tactile, material-based way to build an image through colour, texture and movement.
At first, however, Lynley found the medium frustrating. She could see what she wanted to create but did not yet have the technical knowledge or range of materials to achieve it. A turning point came in 2016, when she travelled to Ravenna and began learning the foundations of classical mosaic: precise cutting, careful laying and the principles that underpin andamento.
Ten years later, those foundations have become part of an increasingly individual visual language.
“It is who I am coming out in mosaics, just as it was who I was coming out in weaving.”
A Painter’s Eye, a Weaver’s Hand
The connection between Lynley’s weaving and mosaic runs much deeper than simply changing materials. Both are built through the accumulation of individual elements and both allow colour, texture, movement and flow to develop gradually across a surface.
As a weaver, Lynley rarely worked with a single strand. She combined several threads so that she could move subtly between tonal values without obvious divisions. Today, she approaches mosaic colour in much the same way, building complex palettes from many closely related tesserae.
For each area of a work, Lynley may assemble a separate colour palette, making swatches and testing relationships between hue and value before committing to the surface. Her tesserae are often extremely small, allowing colour to shift almost imperceptibly and details to remain suggestive rather than literal.
In a recent review of Lynley’s work, she was described as having “a painter’s eye, but a mosaicist’s hand”. Lynley sees the connection extending even further back.
“It was not only a painter’s eye, but a weaver’s hand. Same thing.”
Scenic Weaving by Lynley Jakowyna
Scenic Weaving by Lynley Jakowyna
Learning the Rules, Then Finding Her Own
Lynley’s development as a mosaicist has been grounded in learning. Ravenna gave her the technical foundations she felt she had been missing, while subsequent workshops exposed her to new methods, materials and ways of laying tesserae.
But Lynley has never been particularly interested in reproducing someone else’s approach.
She describes the knowledge she has accumulated as a “basket of tools”. A workshop might be devoted to one particular technique, yet the thing she takes home could be something quite different: the way an artist lays tesserae, solves a transition or handles a particular material.
This echoes Lynley’s experience as a weaver. When she first began, she quickly wanted to move beyond the conventional approach she was being taught. When her teacher told her, “you can’t do that”, Lynley’s response was simple: “I thought, yes you can.” She went home and began working it out for herself.
The same independence is evident in her mosaic practice. Technique matters enormously, but ultimately it must serve the work.
“I’ve got this little basket of tools. That’s my basket of tools. And I don’t think of anything now. I just do it.”
Dalyup Beachwalk, 2026, Lynley Jakowyna
When I Feel, Then I Express
Landscape has been a constant throughout Lynley’s creative life. As a young family, she and her husband would take their children camping, seeking out beautiful places and immersing themselves in the landscape. Those experiences fed her weaving and continue to underpin her mosaics today.
But Lynley is not simply recording scenery.
A place needs to provoke something in her before it becomes a work. She photographs extensively when travelling, but the photograph is not necessarily the subject. It is often the memory of being there, the atmosphere, movement, scale or emotional response that she wants to recover.
This can lead to gentle, finely modulated works, but also to surprisingly powerful shifts in palette. In Tranquil Mooring, for example, the aerial landscape of New Zealand’s Bay of Islands demanded stronger colour than Lynley would usually employ. The landscape felt powerful, so the colour needed to carry that power.
“I see something that makes me feel. When I feel, then I express.”
Tranquil Mooring, 2026, Lynley Jakowyna
The Witness
“I felt something coming down on me. It was this Milky Way like I had never seen before. It was supernatural. It was powerful.”
The Witness, 2024, Lynley Jakowyna
Perhaps no work demonstrates this relationship between experience, emotion and material more clearly than The Witness.
While camping in Karijini National Park in Western Australia, Lynley stepped outside her tent one evening and encountered the Milky Way with an intensity she had never experienced before. There was no photograph. What remained was the sensation of the sky almost descending upon her.
Years later, the experience found its way into mosaic.
Created in response to the theme Time and Materiality, The Witness became an exploration of both deep time and belonging. Lynley made tesserae incorporating sands collected from different parts of Western Australia. A rock form represented Australia, while a branching tree suggested people coming together and taking root.
When conventional tesserae could not give her the fluid quality she wanted for the tree, Lynley taught herself to solder. She also rejected straight lines throughout the work, feeling they had no place in an image rooted so deeply in natural forms.
The result is a work driven not by technique for its own sake, but by a search for the material language capable of carrying an experience.
Solving the Puzzle
Lynley works intensely. Once a mosaic takes hold, she can spend five or more hours a day working on it, often thinking through the next piece while completing the current one. She describes herself as a prolific, even obsessive maker, but doesn’t see this intensity as a commitment.
“I don’t see it as a commitment. I see it as a desire.”
For Lynley, making a mosaic is a puzzle. Before beginning, she is already considering composition, scale, materials, techniques and colour relationships. Much of that planning happens internally. Only when one work is finished does she clear the studio, pull out materials and begin testing the palettes for the next.
It is also a deeply solitary process. Lynley needs concentration and cannot easily work and talk at the same time. There is a great deal of herself invested in each work and, particularly after completing a large piece, she can feel creatively and emotionally exhausted.
Those pauses are not a break from her practice so much as part of it. Travel, landscape and simply having space allow her to replenish until another work begins calling.
“There’s a lot of effort, a lot of emotion and a lot of me that goes into every piece.”
Lynley’s Studio
Lynley’s draftsman’s easel which saves her back when working on larger pieces.
Connection Without Losing Solitude
That need for solitude also shapes the way Lynley engages with the wider mosaic world.
She values being able to work independently while still maintaining connections with other artists, through MAANZ in Western Australia and through Art of Andamento. Workshops offer opportunities to share ideas, observe how others work and add something new to that ever-expanding “basket of tools”.
For Lynley, the flexibility of AoA is particularly important. She does not need to participate constantly to feel connected. She can step in when something speaks to her practice, step away when she needs to focus, and return when she is ready.
It offers a balance that suits an artist whose best work emerges from periods of deep concentration and independence.
“I feel isolated in a creative sense because I mainly work alone, and so it’s lovely to be able to dip in and dip out of the Andamento Academy content.”
Lynley at the Olley to Andamento, Villa Rustica, Byron Bay
Lynley and AoA students at the Olley to Andamento Workshop, Villa Rustica, Byron Bay. Tani Bates, Lynley Jakowyna, Kate Gaery, Caitlin Hepworth (tutor), Xanthe Wells, Annie Balcomb, Jane Denison (host), Trish Budd, Anne Allen, Deanna Kernick.
Olley to Andamento,
Still Life by Lynley
Whether working alone in her studio or standing beneath an immense night sky, Lynley continues to follow the same instinct that first drove her weaving: to take something felt and find the materials capable of expressing it. The medium may have changed, but the impulse behind the work remains entirely her own.
