The Art of Resilience : Kintsugi

I’ve agreed to give a short talk on resilience at a conference in London on Wednesday. Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to say yes to something when you don’t think about it first? Gulp! I want to approach the subject using a mixture of art and the experience of myself and others. It is tempting to see resilience as a kind of armour – something off which life’s projectiles can bounce. I prefer to see resilience as something more flexible, adapting to the challenge rather than resisting it.

I hopped onto Facebook and Twitter yesterday to ask ‘I say resilience, you say…?’. I received a load of responses, at one point I felt overwhelmed by everything coming at me. I may, if I can find the time, curate the stream of replies. Time is pressing and I’m currently settling on three things to explore tomorrow.

  • Responses to bereavement
  • The need for creativity
  • The beauty in impermanence, imperfection, incompletion

For this post I’m focussing on the last point, and connecting with that fact that most of my visual backdrop for the talk will be my art..

Wabi sabi is a Japanese concept, beauty that is impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete. Wabi sabi has a connection to a practice known as kintsugi, or kintsukuroi, the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum. The idea being that the cracks are now a part of the imperfect work, not something to be hidden away, or covered.

I am finding the preparation for this talk quite stressful. I am recalling bereavement and other tough times, and I can only stand to absorb so much of this stuff. I need a release.

I draw a pot – using pencils and a small watercolour brush. I then draw a crack into the pot which I fill with gold.

I found it hard to know when to stop, not very wabi sabi of me! I’ve settled now – it’s good enough. I can see imperfections, incompletions – so to that extent – the art represents my current work well.I’ve titled the piece, ‘You Broke My Heart. I Tried To Fix It, And You Can Still See The Cracks’, and I will hold onto this piece for the Carshalton Artists Open Studios event this summer, which I am excited to be taking part in. I’ll let you know how the Art of Resilience talk goes soon, too.

Author: Doug Shaw

Artist and Consultant. Embracing uncertainty, sketching myself into existence. Helping people do things differently, through an artistic lens.

2 thoughts on “The Art of Resilience : Kintsugi”

  1. Doug, Probably too late, but possible another perspective on resilience. Your post got me thinking about how I would describe resilience and I came up with “the effective processing of premature closure”.

    By this I mean tend to have objectives and goals, some soft some hard, some important, some more inconsequential, but we have them. The natural property of inertia says we tend to keep moving in our current direction of travel, but when circumstances change and push us in new directions we need to accept the premature closure of our present/past expectations and the development/acceptance of a new one..

    I think this aligns well with your concept of imperfection and incompleteness, but maybe phrases it differently.

    Nice bowl, by the way.

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