The Earth as Your Shopping Cart with Rachel Sager

In this unique online course, Rachel Sager, The Forager Mosaicist, will walk you through her signature steps of foraging the earth for the raw materials beneath her feet. You will learn her tricks of the trade for sourcing, categorizing, cutting, and implementing raw stone into the expressive language of andamento. Rachel will take you out into the field as she introduces you to her local stone at The Ruins Project in Pennsylvania and also as she travels to the parts unknown (to her) of the Southern California landscape.

Back in the studio, you will watch as Rachel breaks down, both in idea and practice, each find and explains in detail why some stones work and others are best left where you found them.

Although there is much technical and hands-on learning in this course, prepare to also be enlightened by Rachel’s passionate mindset and philosophy. Changing the way your brain sees and interprets stone is a big first step to tapping into a way of making mosaic that frees you from economic constraint and helps you to be a better artist. You will learn about The Forager’s Philosophy and the crucial difference between a coffee table rock and a soon-to-be tesserae rock.

This is the first Mosaic Arts Online course to take you out of the studio and into the real world as an artist makes decisions. You will have a bird’s eye view of Rachel as she shares her knowledge and love of stone. As a teacher, Rachel has observed students in a foraging atmosphere and notes that there is a clear line between the first outing and the second. Having experimented with cutting your finds after your first adventure, you will make very different decisions on your next trips. Being able to return to this course to watch it again and again will give you an exponential learning curve as you grow as a forager.

This content-rich course has the power to transform your artistic practice and, even more importantly, open your mind to a life-changing way of seeing your world.

There is a downloadable PDF with the tools and materials. They are minimal for this course but Rachel does recommend using a Hammer and Hardie. If you do not own one she gives a very good second option that is cost effective.

The photo below is one of Rachel's works "Color Wheel: Whitsett to Leiper's Fork". It is an excellent example of what can be created from everything found under your feet!