The last week of December was a week of new experiences: my husband and I spent a few days in the Berkshires, taking classes in meditation, art, donkey walking (more on that later…), and more. One of those classes was called The Art of Imperfection, a 90-minute foray into the world of kintsugi. Kintsugi is a Japanese art in which broken pieces of ceramics or pottery are mended with gold.
What it was like: The five of us taking the class began by selecting a small piece of pre-made pottery. I selected a small black bowl, thinking that gold coloring would be striking against the black gloss paint. We then found our seats in a small art studio before the instructor shared a brief overview of kintsugi – the practice and the underlying philosophy.
From there, we took a hammer to our bowls, smashing them into multiple pieces. We reflected on the broken pottery in front of us; I was personally surprised that my bowl only broke into three pieces, while others were frustrated that theirs broke into seven or eight pieces (a more challenging task awaited them in putting their pottery back together).
After discussing our reflections, it was time to put the pots back together. Traditional kintsugi art takes weeks to months to mend pottery, but we sped up the process by using superglue and gold colored paint.
I started on my task of repairing the pottery, using thin lines of superglue along the jagged cracks before joining the pieces back together. This part of the process came naturally to me; perhaps supergluing broken knick knacks around the house is a transferable skill.
Once the glue dried, I used a thin paintbrush to follow the cracks in the pottery with gold paint, doing my best to keep a consistent line thickness while also capturing the unique threads of the cracks. My hand shook and quivered as I painted, the delicacy of the cracks making it difficult to focus the brush tip.
The finished product:
What I learned: I ordinarily bristle at the notion of breaking, scratching, denting, or otherwise harming something that I own. I find it difficult to look past imperfections, even if they’re born from simply using an object as intended.
By wedding the kintsugi art practice with guided self-reflection and mindfulness, I walked away with a different view of imperfection and brokenness.
Flaws and imperfections are never avoidable. But they’re also not something we should hide. Incorporating them into the new whole – a piece of pottery, ourselves – allows the new thing to become the next beautiful version of itself.
Ella Tennant, lecturer at Keele University, puts a finer point on the relationship between kintsugi, transformation, and a concept called wabi-sabi – the worldview that everything is transient and imperfect:
That new thing might not be perfect or be how you had envisioned it would be, but it is beautiful. Rather than try to disguise the flaws, the kintsugi technique highlights and draws attention to them. The philosophy of kintsugi, as an approach to life, can help encourage us when we face failure. We can try to pick up the pieces, and if we manage to do that we can put them back together. The result might not seem beautiful straight away but as wabi-sabi teaches, as time passes, we may be able to appreciate the beauty of those imperfections.
Ella Tennant, The Conversation
As a long-suffering perfectionist, I’ll be keeping the small black-and-gold bowl on my office desk, a reminder that flaws are a beautiful, unique part of us.
