Text by Amy Azzarito, AD Clever
We’ve all had the heart-breaking experience of watching as a favorite mug or plate inadvertently slipped from our hands and shattered on the kitchen floor. Maybe you tried to glue some of the pieces together or researched repair options, only to realize that it was a lost cause—either too time-consuming or too expensive. While the goal of traditional Western-style ceramic repair is to make the piece look like it was never damaged, there’s a four-hundred-year-old Japanese tradition that may have saved your fragile treasure from the garbage bin.
This repair technique is called kintsugi, which translates as "golden joinery" and uses a special lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum, to fix the object in a way that highlights (rather than hides) the damage. It’s a way of repair that celebrates the breakage as part of the object’s history, rather than as the end of the story. More than merely a craft technique, kintsugi is an outgrowth of the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, a belief in the beauty of imperfections.
According to legend, the craft was invented when 15th-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke his favorite Chinese tea bowl and sent it back to China to be repaired. The bowl was returned, fixed, but held together by ugly metal staples. The coarseness of the repair spurred the Japanese craftsman on to find a more elegant repair solution. Kintsugi arose as a way to not merely fix a broken object but to transform it into something beautiful.
English embroidery artist Charlotte Bailey combines traditional kintsugi technique with her needlework skills to restitch a broken piece. Rather than using lacquer, she covers the fragments with cloth and stitches them together with gold thread.
So that favorite bowl or teacup took a tumble? Now what? If you’re a motivated DIYer, you can buy made-in-Japan kintsugi repair kits on Amazon, which will guide through the traditional process. DIY but with a little guidance is more your speed? Try a kintsugi class. You can often find a kintsugi artist, in most major cities, who is willing to guide you through the process.
And if you covet the kintsugi look, you don’t need to wait for an accidental break (or start smashing dishes in your cabinet)—you can buy original kintsugi pottery from artists like Robin Puro in Taos, New Mexico who sells her work on Etsy. (If you have your own damaged treasure, Robin can handle that for you as well.) Whether your kintsugi is a restored piece you love or a new acquisition, the piece will always remind you of the beauty in imperfections. Pretty impressive work for a simple, broken tea-cup.
Feature Image: Courtesy of Smithsonian Institute; Images: Unsplash
