For years, Elle Decor has been the home of style. The ultimate guide to decorating and design, the magazine is an essential source for those who want to create a more beautiful life.

Each month, Elle Decor asks an artist to create a unique item for the “Not for Sale” feature. At the end of the year, each piece will be auctioned off. Funds from the “Not for Sale” auction will benefit the charity of Elle Decor’s choice. This year, there are only nine issues of Elle Decor magazine, meaning only nine artists were invited to participate in the famed “Not for Sale” feature. You can imagine our excitement when we were asked to be among those nine and would be featured in the September 2020 issue of Elle Decor.

Written by Elle Decor’s Vanessa Lawrence and produced by Parker Bowie Larson, “Picking Up the Pieces: An Artfully Textured Mosaic Work Draws Inspiration From Modern Global Connectivity,” can be seen below.

Few art forms are better suited, figuratively speaking, to capturing today’s global mindset than mosaics, whose basis is the meticulous application of tiny glass tesserae into a larger cohesive design. Still, Cean Irminger, the creative director of the Virginia-based company New Ravenna, admits that it requires ingenuity to reimagine an ancient technique for 21st century concerns, as she has done here with her “For All” creation.

“It can be tricky to innovate with a craft that has been practiced for thousands of years. I believe our stamp on it can be seen in our work with textures.” – Cean Irminger

In this piece, an ode to universal togetherness, Irminger used New Ravenna’s proprietary matte Seaglass accented with brass and 24-karat gold for the background of a historical map and glossy glass for the “For All” lettering, so the message stands out only in certain light.

“The world feels so fragmented right now, but we have a chance to unite all the disparate pieces and create something hopeful.” – Cean Irminger

As a good friend said, “It took a mosaic village to pull this one off,” and all of us at New Ravenna are so proud to be one of those villagers.