Artist Tricia Huffman works on two small mosaic pieces for an upcoming gallery showing while in her downtown studio on Thursday.

Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com

Pittsfield Township-based artist Tricia Huffman owns teaching studio Mended Pieces Mosaics and teaches students a wide range of fine art mosaic techniques. The artist — who works with glass, found objects, ceramics, paper, and a number of other media — also does commissioned artworks for homes and businesses, and she creates jewelry through her other business, Leo Boucha Tileworks.

For the last year, Mended Pieces Mosaics has been located in downtown Ann Arbor, at the corner of 4th and Huron. However, Huffman recently decided to move her teaching studio back out to her farm near Michigan and Platt in Pittsfield Township. Although you will soon see the studio leave downtown, she reassures, “I’m not interrupting classes” and “we aren’t going out of business. I’m just moving back to a better space.”

The farm studio “is more like a retreat. It’s really beautiful out there,” Huffman says. The property features three barns, classroom space, and pottery and metals studios, situated on three acres of land surrounded by another 65 acres. “This summer, I’m going to be planting an edible garden around the classroom, so that people can pick nasturtiums and edible flowers to have in their salads,” she reports.

“I’m trying to expand my school to be more of an artist’s retreat, so you can learn ceramics, lampwork (a type of glass work), Scherenschnitte (German paper cutting), and more. I’m trying to turn my property into more of an artist compound,” Huffman says.

The relocated Mended Pieces Mosaics will continue offering the same lineup of ongoing workshops, open studio time for students who fulfill a prerequisite, and specialized one-day classes after the move. Four times a week, she offers mosaic workshops to anyone age 14 and up working at any skill level. Some students come in with a particular project in mind that they want to do or a particular technique that they want to learn. “Whatever technique you want to learn, I will teach it to you,” she explains.

In addition to these open-ended workshops, Huffman offers a number of recurring one-day classes that explore specific types of fine mosaic art like working with tempered glass, stacked glass, gold, found objects, and Smalti glass. She is also welcoming the warmer weather with a “Mosaic Art for the Garden” workshop, in which students can make things like stepping stones, birdbaths, and columns for their yards.

The techniques Huffman teaches result in “fine artworks. It’s not a craft. It’s a fine art. I teach my students to fuss over a piece endlessly. I teach them how to do the techniques properly and how to finish them professionally,” she explains. She works quite closely with her students, always keeping a close eye on what they are doing. “I don’t want them to feel like I’m hawking over their shoulder, but I’m with them all the time, so that I can guide them in their techniques,” she says.

Tricia Huffman offers a closer look at one of her mosaics.

Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com

Huffman started making mosaics when she was only 7 years old. Her mother has fallen ill and she spent a number of summers living with different family members. One summer, she was living with her Native American grandmother, Silver Cloud Boucha, who “used to let me break her dishes and mosaic her furniture,” she remembers. “What I found in this experience was a peace and a serenity that she knew that I needed but I didn’t know that I needed,” she says.

Her love of art blossomed after the summer she spent with her grandmother. Other family members supported her creative pursuits by buying her art supplies for her birthday. At age 12, she was really encouraged to keep it up after winning a competition in Royal Oak. “At that point, I started mosaicing just about everything. I mosaiced bowls and cups. I started going to garage sales in the neighborhood and looking for things that I could break up. I started collecting rocks and gems, found objects, broken light pieces and light bulbs,” she says.

After leaving mosaics behind for a while during the early part of her professional career, Huffman rediscovered her love for it in a rather unusual way — she was working as a dental assistant. “The doctor would very often give me the little pieces of gold or wire to do something with. I started thinking, why did I get away from my mosaics? I started doing things with teeth, gold, wires, and the little odd parts that most people would find unappealing. I turned them into art art pieces for the office,” she explains.

After working at the dentist’s office, Huffman began teaching art professionally and opened Leo Boucha Tileworks, in 1991, which she named after her Native American grandmother and her favorite uncle Leo. After living in Linden and Brighton, she moved to Pittsfield Township with her husband John, in 2003, and started teaching students out on the farm.

Some of Huffman’s own fine art mosaics are quite “dark,” she says. For example, a large mosaic picturing “the first angel of the apocalypse” sits near the window of the downtown studio she will soon being leaving. At first glance, the image might not seem violent — no death or destruction is actually shown. However, she explains that “it is actually holding the bowl of wrath at the moment when it is looking up waiting for that final second when God says, drop the bowl,” according to Huffman.

The angel mosaic also exemplifies how Huffman incorporates objects that carry their own meanings or deepen the meaning of the artwork in one way or another. “The big shells that you see on the wings came from a gun and knife handle company. They came from a place that makes objects that are made for violence,” she says.

During my visit to the studio, Huffman showed me a piece she was working on for a competition put on by Contemporary Mosaic Artists, an online symposium of mosaic artists from all over the world. Her new mosaic, Living While Dying, pictures little grim reapers dancing around a cemetery vase.

Not all of her artworks are so grim. She reports that she is in talks with Pittsfield Township and Saline about creating public artworks, probably in collaboration with Chelsea-based artist Rick DeTroyer, which will be much lighter. For Pittsfield Township, “I’m going to do these 15 foot flowers that will be made on heavy-duty leaf springs — like you would find under a truck — with giant three-foot flower heads that are going to be glittery and mosaiced,” she explains. The leaf springs will allow the flowers to “bob in the wind,” she says. For Saline, she is planning to create “mosaic art seating with a huge faux tree or vine that sticks up from the middle of the seating. We will train some kind of flora on it,” she predicts.

Jennifer Eberbach is a free-lance writer who covers art for AnnArbor.com.