Mosaic adds warmth to IFC shelter

The buzz of drills filled the dining room of the Inter-Faith Council’s community shelter Tuesday morning as workers installed the room’s much-anticipated new artwork.

The noise momentarily subsided when they stepped back to admire the first section of the colorful, broken-tile mosaic they had successfully affixed to the wall.

“Oh my goodness, first try! Wow!” said Kate Flory, executive administrator for the Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission, the group that sponsored the project.

The mosaic, a project three years in the making, adds a shock of blue and yellow warmth to the otherwise bleak white walls of the room.

Local artist Sally Erickson completed the mosaic, funded by the commission’s Percent for Art program — which devotes 1 percent of pubic projects’ budgets to public art — in conjunction with the shelter renovations finished in September.

Her mosaic is split into three sections by two windows. A yellow building representing the shelter and a cityscape of Chapel Hill stretches across all three.

Inside are objects representing the services the shelter provides, including a plate, a stethoscope, a bed and a person sitting at a desk.

In the center of the scene is a pair of conjoining faces above two outstretched hands.

Erickson said her piece was inspired by talking with IFC staff, volunteers and guests about their experiences with the shelter.

“One of the volunteers talked about how being a volunteer had been so meaningful to her because it’s a place where she could be very real,” she said.

Erickson said the central theme of the mosaic, suggested by a resident, is giving and receiving — represented by the open hands.

“The people who work here receive too,” she said.

In addition to giving input on the design, residents had a more hands-on influence on the project by laying tiles during a January workday.

“It sort of opens up the quirkiness in all us to be around people who aren’t in the mainstream,” Erickson said of working with residents.

Bob Chase, a shelter volunteer for the past few years, said he thinks the mosaic has a calming effect on the dining room.

“It seems to me it’s going to bring more of a hominess and less of an industrial atmosphere.”

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