About Pauline
PAULINE PEARSALL has been a creator of beauty from different elements since her earliest years when she sewed clothing for herself—and her mother, her first teacher. In addition to owning and operating a very successful home-staging company in the San Francisco Bay Area, she has been a professional seamstress and dressmaker; a published quilter; an artist in the medium of acrylic paints; a woodworker; a ceramicist; and a lifelong collector of objets of “usable art’ that range from antique sterling-silver tableware and baby cups, to museum-quality glass kitchenware, to china plates, cups, baubles, and bagatelles. Blending all her experiences and an artist’s eye for colorful combinations, she is now a bricoleuse—a creator of bricolage artworks in the form of wall mirrors, their frames intricately covered in thoughtfully selected fragments of chinaware.
Bricolage (a French word meaning a “do it yourself” artistic construction, related to bric-a-brac, small articles collected for antiquarian, sentimental, decorative, or other reasons: both ultimately stem from une bricole, a little thing or a trifle) is the creation of art from a variety of available objects. Pauline carefully selects small, image-bearing ceramics from the astronomical quantity of vintage used-china pieces offered for sale, breaks them up to isolate the desired visual elements, then assembles these on custom-made mirror frames that she personally designs and cuts out with a jigsaw, each devoted to a particular theme.
In her large and well-equipped studio–The Cup and Hammer, in Oakland, California—with her lush secret garden just outside the back door, surrounded by hundreds of ceramic pieces and fragments awaiting placement in future projects, she lovingly assembles each bricolage; delighted to repurpose mass-produced and no-longer-wanted pieces into absolutely unique, suitable-for-display works of mirror art that are “greater than the sum of their parts.” Pauline works with customers near and far thanks to the magic of the internet; and loves the personal contact and planning of a project done in collaboration with a client. She also maintains a small “hall of mirrors” that are already completed and available for purchase.