Golden Joinery
Imperfection and acceptance via the medium of clay...
“… kintsugi has long represented prevalent philosophical ideas. Namely, the practice is related to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which calls for seeing beauty in the flawed or imperfect. The repair method was also born from the Japanese feeling of mottainai, which expresses regret when something is wasted, as well as mushin, the acceptance of change”.
from an article by Kelly Richman-Abdou on https://mymodernmet.com/kintsugi-kintsukuroi/
The other week I opened up the kiln to find a piece I had spent hours working on had fallen to pieces during the firing. This does happen (even to Grayson Perry) and we potters try to accept it. But I tell you reader, I swore some swears into the quiet morning air and frightened the cat in the process (sorry Woody). Then I had a little weep, even though we potters are not supposed to cry over broken pots. It's one of those “first rules of pottery club’ type things. Other rules in the pottery club of “just me” are:
1. Don't fire something if you already know it's a bit weird looking and is giving off a bad vibe, and you are simply in denial about that. .
2. You're too old to carry two 12.5kg bags of clay simultaneously so don’t (but you’re going to do it anyway aren’t you).
3. If you glaze that in a hurry, you'll fuck it up.
and
4. Don't upset the kiln goddesses/gods
I am coming round to the idea that 3 is what happened here (or possibly 4, and though I didn’t deny them three times before the cock crowed or anything, they are notoriously capricious).
Woe is me!
What could I do - throw it in the bin?
I absolutely hate throwing things in the bin! There is (see above) a Japanese word for this -mottainai –regret of things wasted.
Nothing goes in the bin here without a discussion - even with myself - about if it can be saved; we mended our 20 year old vacuum cleaner when it refused to come to life one day (this involved getting a tiny electrical thingy from a model railway shop, and a husband who knows more about electrical things than I do) but usually it’s socks, bag straps and pedal bins, stuff like that.
But, I haven’t mended a huge pot before.
I’ve never counted the hours it takes me to make one of these vases. These pieces are built from the bottom up in patches of textured clay. They can take a couple of days and can be left overnight half- built, if wrapped in a plastic shroud so they don't dry out. Once started I must carry on pretty steadily otherwise they really are likely to open up along the joins, I know how to mostly avoid that – lots of joining slip and an eye on the general temperature and humidity. I only glaze the inside of these landscape pots, and I had used this transparent glaze before, on the same clay, so I don't know what I did, but the pot broke, and I needed it not to be broken, since I don’t have a time machine I needed another way.
I’d heard of Kintsugi of course, the Japanese way of mending pottery with lacquer and gold. It certainly looks better than staples which is what, apparently, was used before. Gold is beyond my means but there is a version called ‘New Kintsugi’ in which the lacquer is replaced with epoxy resin, and the gold with gold mica powder. Since I can’t resist learning a new crafty thing, and I had a broken pot, I decided to give kintsugi a go.
Before the glue and gold stage I had to smash the pot up a bit more - a ‘no going back from this’ feeling came over me, acceptance – “mushin” I suppose. If I hadn’t done that, I was sure it would just pull itself apart again. Once it was in many more pieces than I started with it was time to put it back together. This took ages and was a steep learning curve:
If I mixed too much epoxy it dried out before I used it up
The epoxy I wanted to firm up reasonably speedily – the stuff on the surfaces to be joined – took mysteriously longer to firm up than that in the mixing pot
There’s a very short window between ‘tacky’ epoxy, which the gold mica will stick to, and “almost completely dry”, which it won’t stick to.
There will be gold mica everywhere. Like the aftermath of a Christmas craft session in a primary school.
And I mean everywhere, for weeks, despite a lot of cleaning. It’s quite pretty though and makes the studio look rather otherworldly on a sunny day
Even as I was putting the pot together something magical started to happen. This was almost the pot I had originally made, but it was not. It was pot from a parallel universe, one which which had always meant to be fractured and gold. Or it had decided to reinforce the archaeological theme it depicts – the Uffington Horse and neighbouring Iron Age hillfort- by imitating the broken pottery found on archaeological digs and put back together for display.
This unique method celebrates each artifact's unique history by emphasizing its fractures and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them. In fact, kintsugi often makes the repaired piece even more beautiful than the original, revitalizing it with a new look and giving it a second life.
from an article by Kelly Richman-Abdou on https://mymodernmet.com/kintsugi-kintsukuroi/
I didn’t expect to be so delighted by this process. Despite my love of mending things it usually feels more of a chore. This wasn’t, it was more a next step in the making of this pot. I now have something which somehow more than it was before – slightly wonky and imperfect yet still beautiful, it's definitely wabi-sabi.
First published on Substack, 5th April 2024