Roman Mosaic c. 2025
Jeremy Deller & Coralie Turpin
I collaborated with Turner Prize winning Artist Jeremy Deller to create a new artwork for Scarborough. Following Jeremy’s concept and collaborative direction I made a mosaic artwork depicting sea creatures for the new sea watching station on Marine Drive.
The mosaic is fragmentary, a piece of modern archaeology, looking like it has just been uncovered.
The mosaic took 18 months to design and make with 4 months being the construction phase cutting and setting 300,000 tesserae with 8 assistants in my Yorkshire Artspace studio.
The piece is a permanent installation and was commissioned by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust through Invisible Dust and freelance curator Jeannie Griffin.
Deller’s new artwork Roman Mosaic c. 2025 – created in collaboration with sculptor and mosaic artist Coralie Turpin – is a fragmentary, large-scale Roman-style floor mosaic inspired by Scarborough’s sea life and its Roman past.
The artwork forms part of the new Seawatching Station on Marine Drive, one of the best places on the English coast to see dolphins and porpoises with more than 350 sightings in the last year. Visitors can enjoy free seawatching telescopes and comprehensive wildlife information providing insight into the incredible marine life viewable from the area.
Roman Mosaic c. 2025 has been developed in consultation with local scientists, conservationists, archaeologists and community groups and builds on Jeremy Deller’s long-standing fascination with cultural history.