In a cramped studio in Ravenna, Italy, Takako Hirai runs her finger along the cracks in a mosaic artwork depicting dappled light in a park. The spaces between the tiles, she explains, determine the flow and movement of a mosaic, even more than the arrangement of the pieces themselves — as if meaning were slipping through the cracks to be teased out by the observer. It makes mosaic the perfect medium for embedding the kakushi-e, or hidden images, that the artist from Kumamoto places in her work — both to hide her inner self and reveal it.
"The gaps determine the way the artist wished to express their work," she says.
Secrets lurk in mosaics from ancient times, and they have been essential to Hirai's work in Ravenna, home to magnificent sixth-century Byzantine mosaics and today the epicenter of a surprising Italian efflorescence of mosaic as contemporary art.