Redefining Loss
The Japanese art of kintsugi centers around repairing, repurposing, and embracing a broken or imperfect object, finding new meaning in the process. The pandemic has challenged us in many ways, be it with our relationships, personal values, day-to-day lives, or anything else. Often, we think of these changes as losses, but sometimes, they could also be opportunities to reevaluate ourselves and grow in a direction we’ve previously never considered. Yet, much of school assignments remain the same as “what they were like before” and are as impersonal as ever, not acknowledging the psychical shifts experienced by students and teachers alike. This drawing-and-collage assignment is an opportunity to reflect on your personal feelings and acknowledge that things aren’t “what they were like before”, while also trying to find a new purpose in what was loss.
Steps (with an example below)
- Reflect on major changes you’ve experienced because of the pandemic. These could be more visible things like shifts in friendships, or more abstract things like loss of confidence.
- Pick five of these things, and draw and color visualizations/symbols of them on separate sheets of paper.
- Tear these five drawings apart and shuffle the pieces.
- On a larger sheet of paper, create a collage using these pieces purposefully and however you like. The goal of this process is to reframe the meaning of your symbols. Here are some guiding questions:
a. How have these experiences affected you?
b. What have these experiences revealed to you about yourself?
c. What do you hope to gain from these experiences?
d. What matters to you right now?
e. What image can you make from these torn-apart pieces to represent a-d? - Write a paragraph reflecting how you hope to reclaim and redefine things you feel you’ve lost.
Bonus step: Tear up the collage and create another collage!
To submit: Take a picture of your collage (and if you’re comfortable, your paragraph) and email it to your teacher!
Example by a classmate of mine:
In my collage, I turned the things that I’ve lost into a tree. During the pandemic, the amount of in-person social interactions I have has been greatly reduced. I feel like I’ve drifted apart from some friendships and have changed a lot of my plans. Before the pandemic, I also felt like I was slowly gaining social skills and self-esteem through in-person interactions and basically putting myself out there more. The pandemic, I feel, has set me back, in terms of my own personal development. As time goes forward, I hope to plant seeds that will help me grow and blossom to the person I want to be after the hardships I’ve experienced due to the pandemic.
