Put Back Together

A few years ago, I came across a book that introduced me to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi.

Wabi-sabi embraces the beauty of imperfection and the transient nature of life. It celebrates the appreciation of things that are imperfect, incomplete, and fleeting.

A concept closely related to wabi-sabi is kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Instead of hiding the cracks, kintsugi highlights them, acknowledging the object’s history and transforming its flaws into something beautiful.

Inspired by these ideas, I decided to incorporate them into my own artwork. For this piece, I photographed a tree outside my house that was adorned with vibrant fuchsia blooms, but only for two short days. I was fortunate enough to capture it before the flowers faded.

I then took four Polaroid prints of the tree, cut them up, shuffled the pieces, and stitched them back together. The result is a composition that embodies the spirit of wabi-sabi and kintsugi, where beauty is found in the fragmented and the fleeting.