.jpg) |
| Please tell me if you know the original source for this photo. |
Kintsukuroi (金繕い) is a Japanese technique of repairing broken ceramics with metal lacquer, usually gold or silver. Kintsugi (金継ぎ) (Japanese: golden joinery) is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with a lacquer resin sprinkled with powdered gold (Wikipedia.)
Kintsugi, or restoring with gold, is a grand symbol.
You take a heap of brokenness and repair it with gold, so that visible veins run through a ceramic. The vessel repaired is a wholeness, a completion, redeemed by the gold lacquer binding the pieces like a strong, bright spirit.
Yet the breaks are not forgotten, are not wiped away.
All things are bound into one, the whole and the broken. The object may well be much more beautiful than it was, lifted from the pedestrian and prosaic to the extraordinary.
How infinitely evocative this idea is...
To me the image of the is most fruitful when thinking about two things: stories--I love the kind of story where the worst possible thing happens and yet in the end, the event turns into some kind of blessing, however strange; or the progress of the soul, restored after breakage. The human form has long been seen as a kind of pot, thrown by the master potter from simple clay. The Adam of Genesis bears a name that suggests man, red coloration, making (Akkadian adamu, to make), and earth (Hebrew adamah.)
As a symbol, though, the image of the broken pot joined with gold or silver is both simple and capable of bearing enormous freight. No doubt it means many things to many people.
As a symbol, though, the image of the broken pot joined with gold or silver is both simple and capable of bearing enormous freight. No doubt it means many things to many people.
