I recently fixed my left shoe with red darning thread. It helps that I study in CSM, the temple of acceptance and fashion experimentation, but I can still feel some judgy glances coming from my right shoe.
But seriously, I am thinking about repairing a lot these days, and the outrageous prices in London are surprisingly not responsible for it this.I have discovered that I can have relationships with my possessions. Japanese have been doing so since the 15th century.
Kintsugi means “golden repair” in Japanese. It is the ancient Japanese art of fixing broken ceramics with a precious lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, giving a unique appearance to the piece.
Kintsugi technique goes hand in hand with Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which is all about seeing beauty in the flawed or imperfect. The repair method is also linked to the Japanese feeling of mottainai, which expresses regret when something is wasted, as well as mushin, the acceptance of change.
« Every cloud has its silver lining » as we say. In other words, every wound could turn out to be a beautiful scar. Kintsugi exemplifies this phrase. This repair method emphasizes each ceramic’s unique history by celebrating its fractures and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them. Repaired pieces gain even more value and beauty than the originals.
Giving a new life to objects is also the aim of artist Alice Anderson. In a talk at the Royal academy of Arts last October, she explains how sorry she feels for now useless objects, such as alarm clocks, and wants to celebrate them in a new way. She performs rituals to say goodbye to those objects or finds them new purposes.
Anderson also began to « memorise » objects from her London studio with copper-coloured wire. Through Alice’s work, and an old-fashioned Bakelite telephone assumes the shape of an animal’s head (Disney’s Mickey Mouse comes to mind) so that a device for hearing looks as if it might actually be listening. The objects shift category and genre.
Anderson admits having a strong relationship to objects : “I always worry about breaking or losing an object, therefore I have established rules: when one of the objects around me is likely to become obsolete or is lost in the stream of our lives, I memorise it with wire before it happens. If an object breaks, I encapsulate it in steel, […] then I perform a ritual and when the dance is over, everything is repaired. The broken relation is healed”. One could think that Alice’s strong relationships to objects is radical, but it is not that rare if we put it into perspective, as most people tend to grow a childlike dependency to their electronic devices. It is time we developed healthy relationships to objects and learned how to repair their broken hearts.
* « The transformative object », Royal Academy of Arts
Marie-Liesse Bernard is an MA Innovation Management student at Central Saint Martins.
References
Alice Anderson’s website :http://alice-anderson.org/memorised-objects/
