Gateways from Perfection with Claire Brill
Saturday, November 1, 2025, 2:30 pm
To make expressive, creative work is to be vulnerable. The insecurities we all carry about our work can make creation feel simultaneously as frightening as it is wonderful – akin to constantly running on a treadmill, uphill on high speed – aka perfectionism. Even after 25 years as a mosaic artist and dozens of large-scale projects, I found myself deep in perfectionism’s grip.
In response, I devoted two years to the creation of 25 mosaic faces entitled Gateways From Perfection. This talk addresses how I confronted perfectionism and the unexpected places the journey of making a series led.
I started this work during COVID. I needed a project and began making mosaics of faces from contour drawings I doodled during Zoom meetings. The drawings were loose and unpolished, and I aimed to keep the mosaics in a similar spirit, sensing this might create an opportunity to address my fears. I intentionally set parameters to roadblock my perfectionism, such as restricting new purchases. I wanted to wildly explore the materials I already had – both because I love the materiality of mosaics, but also to tap into their expressive potential. The more faces I made, the more emotional depth they gained, and the more I felt connected to the work.
In the talk, I share how the processes of material experimentation and emotional expression evolved together, ultimately shifting my relationship with perfectionism.
While making the Gateways faces, I realized that setting parameters can be liberating. I learned that circumventing perfectionism has a lot to do with the relationship to time, one’s deeper self, instinct, pla,y and movement. And for me, following an idea through many iterations opened up depth and creativity in unexpected ways, and led to a more profound understanding of myself both as an artist and a person.
Claire Brill is a professional mosaic artist who works out of her home studio in Media, PA. After creating dozens of large-scale community mosaics Claire now focuses on her individual artistic voice and teaches at Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia. Her years of study at The Chicago Mosaic School have included mentorship by world renowned mosaicists.
Claire creates contemporary fine art employing the essence of mosaic, material properties and the relationship of pieces to each other, to express meaning in her abstract work. She loves the infinite possibilities for interplay between materials and composition. Drawing from her own growth journey, Claire expresses moments of emotion and physical sensation in powerful yet subtle and sensitive ways.