Artist Mends Broken Porcelain With Wire and Knives

By
Chris L
-

Artist Glen Taylor brings life into porcelain pieces that are broken and rejected by others. He found a unique way to do that: he’s using barbed wire, knives, household objects, pages from old books, etc. The result is a contrasting piece that emphasizes the fragile beauty of porcelain.

Taylor used to work with pottery, which he found pretty limiting. He soon found it liberating to break the ceramics into little pieces. “I had read about the ancient art of Kintsugi and decades before I had learned how to copper foil and solder stained glass windows. All of a sudden I felt the emotional expressive range was infinite,” This is Colossal quotes him.

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#kintsugi #repaired #arttherapy #healed

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Kintsugi is a Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the pieces together with golden or silver lacquer. Taylor went a step further and imagined the ceramics fixed with various other items instead.

He gathers materials at sales and auctions, typically choosing the pieces that remind him of his childhood. Check out his work below and see more on Instagram.

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Watching the birds, building their nests just outside the window, awakens a quiet grief… -Two years ago, my ailing parents moved into assisted living and I sold my childhood home. And now, out of a corner of my heart, an urge arrives, to go back to that house and ask the new owners if I can go down the hall to my little boy bedroom and curl up on my boyhood bed and take a child’s nap, simple and deep and safe. But it’s all gone. And I’m so tired of pretending to be a grown-up, making grown-up decisions in a fucked-up grown-up world. And the best I can do, is take my grandmother’s china, and a few things I find in my pockets, and build my own nest. #nest #brokenchina #homeagain #lost

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It’s been almost a year since my mother died. And in opening the grief, I have mostly grieved for her childhood. It was cruel. I am sad for my mother’s life. Her father was a angry man, forced to leave a good life in his own country where his family was important, and to immigrate to a place where he was looked down on as a “stupid foreigner” because he struggled with English, bitter until the day he died. And my grandmother, in a story I heard many times, would control her six children with drama, threatening to throw herself in the nearby river if they didn’t behave, my mother recalled her and her siblings chasing their mother to the river yelling “No, Mama, no!” My grandmother was also a stranger in a strange land forced as a child to leave her parents to come here. And then there was a picture of purgatory hanging above my mother’s childhood bed, just a tiny girl, warned every night that she was going to burn in hell if she wasn’t a good girl. And that is how my grandparents were also raised. -It took me a very long time to learn about and maybe understand my grandparents. It was a life of survival, when love was only expressed with food on the table and clothes on your back. I had to learn that there aren’t “good” or “bad” people. Just damaged people, broken people. And when I accepted that, some forgiveness slowly followed, and some compassion for everyone of us. And maybe grief isn’t just a “process” maybe it’s a gift to be opened. . below, a new piece, made from my grandmother’s china…. #grief #kintsugi #barbedwire #brokenness #mended #arttherapy

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#repairs #mending #kintsugi #time #arttherapy

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