"A Smash Hit"
 Mary Jane Harris - Garden and Home

After hearing me compliment Glenda Kaplan on her collection of pretty plates, her son Joshua confides, "You do know she breaks them." He wasn't joking. A feature of Glenda's work is the beautiful porcelain plates which are smashed and then painstakingly reconstructed in her designs.

If she finds it hard to break these exquisite plates, she's not telling. "But my mother-in-law gets seriously anxious whenever I even look at her collection of plates," she says with a smile.

A human resources councellor by profession, Glenda has always been involved with crafts, from painting furniture to decoupage. A close friend introduced her to mosaic and she hasn't looked back. Her large mosaic pots embellished with fine china are snapped up as soon as they are completed.

Each pot is unique. "I don't want to become like a production line," she says. Pots take around 50 solid hours of work. Her 'studio' is the patio of their farm house outside Johannesburg. Here she carfully arranges fragments of beautiful plates (she's very drawn to Royal Albert) with peices of hand painted tiles so that they either harmonise or clash, giving each pot its own vibe or character. The inclusion of a small ceramic rose is her signature.

"I find it very therapeutic. I'm totally focussed. Mine is not the neat, evenly spaced, conventional style of mosaic. I'm more passionate and I need to be more free."