I showed a friend my silver leafed cracked cement pieces, and she informed me of a tradition (Kintsugi) of fixing broken pottery in Japan. When a tea cup breaks, they glue the piece back adding silver or gold to the crack, they appreciate the fragile and unique beauty in the imperfect thus highlighting it. This serendipitous connection feels similar to my experience with my installation Free Now and the Mongolian Oovoo. I am amazed by our innate and intuitive senses to heal, transform and acknowledge beauty in life. The impulse is seemingly in all of us despite our culture, location or time.
Kintsugi (金継ぎ) (Japanese: golden joinery) is the art of fixing Japanese broken pottery with a laquered resin sprinkled with powdered gold or silver.
“Outsiders may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing,“ historian Kakuzo Okakura wrote of the tea ceremony in his 1906 work The Book of Tea. “But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity; we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea cup. Mankind has done worse.”
1 comment:
I just wanted to let you know that I stumbled across this post and cited it in my own blog, Roses and Light. It's a lovely post. I've also explored some of your other more recent entries--I think your photos are lovely and joyful and am amazed by your work as an artist. Thank you for sharing.
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