Before Roanoke artist Jane Schultz began her work on the Tiles for America project, she looked through the profiles of the people she'd been assigned:

Carlos Lillo, a paramedic with the New York Fire Department.

John Levi, a New York Port Authority police officer who was proud of his Harley-Davidson.

Craig Lilore, a 30-year-old stock trader whose picture shows him proudly displaying his newborn child for the camera.

There were also electricians, systems analysts, secretaries, vice presidents, firefighters and others.

Altogether there were 26 people on Schultz's list -- each one a victim of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- and her task was to paint their names across two 6-inch square ceramic tiles.

"Reading about the individuals made it so much more tragic and real," she said. "It doesn't matter where they were from or what kind of job they did. There were just so many."

Tiles for America is a memorial that has been assembled outside St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan in New York. Many of those injured at the World Trade Center were taken to that hospital.

Tiles for America organizer Lorrie Veasey said about 6,000 tiles -- painted with angels, flags, song lyrics and other images -- now hang on the chain-link fence that surrounds that facility. Through artists such as Schultz, Veasey hopes to collect tiles with the names of each victim so that all of them will be represented on the tragedy's fifth anniversary.

"At its peak it held roughly 8,000 to 10,000 tiles," Veasey said in a phone interview Friday. "We got anonymous tiles from Japan, from China, from all over Europe. We had tiles from Hawaii and Alaska, and now those are gone. Unfortunately, two months ago vandals destroyed roughly a fourth of the tiles that hang there."

Such setbacks, though frustrating, don't daunt her.

"The medium is permanent, but the environment makes it impermanent because of weather and damage and theft," she said. "There are still tiles that went up on Sept. 12 [2001], and there are tiles from yesterday. It's constantly rotating and changing."

Schultz, who owns the Glazed Bisque-It pottery studio in downtown Roanoke, got involved in the project through the Contemporary Ceramics Studios Association; her entries were added this past weekend. They include two tiles -- one with 10 names on it, the other with 16 -- plus a third tile that indicates the artist's hometown, a piece Schultz decorated with a drawing of the Mill Mountain Star.

In fact, Virginia will be well-represented in Tiles for America. Veasey said a pottery studio in Virginia Beach delivered more than 1,500 tiles to the effort; she also got tiles from studios in Leesburg, Chesapeake and from the Creative Kiln in Lexington.

Schultz said each tile takes about a day to make. A bisque tile is painted with underglaze paint, then dried, then dipped in a clear gloss glaze. It's fired in a kiln that, over the course of eight hours, eventually reaches temperatures of more than 1,800 degrees. Once it has been fired, a tile takes about 16 hours to cool.

Though the process is relatively simple, Schultz said the work gave her a new perspective on a day that's now a half-decade old.

"We're so far removed from what happened, and five years farther from then," Schultz said. "This, for me, has really put a face on what happened."

On the Net: www.tilesforamerica.com.