Golden Repair: The poignant importance of confronting damage

  • "Forget your perfect offering, there's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

    - Leonard Cohen

    Gold powder, as seen in much of Rosannagh’s work, references the Japanese art of kintsugi, or ‘golden repair’, which treats breakage and repair as something to confront and highlight, rather than disguise. This philisophy on loss and damage encompasses a culture of repair than can be paralleled with the climate crisis. We should all mend and repair, rather than discard and replace. That which is broken can be fixed, and the scars left behind should be seen and remembered so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Beauty, strength and resilience stems from that which has been broken.

  • Kintsugi: Golden Repair Kintsugi (Japanese: 金継ぎ, lit. 'golden joinery'), also known as kintsukuroi (金繕い, 'golden repair'), is the Japanese art...
    Kintsugi: Golden Repair

    Kintsugi (Japanese: 金継ぎ, lit. 'golden joinery'), also known as kintsukuroi (金繕い, "golden repair"), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

     

    Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence

    Taken from the Japanese words 'wabi', which translates to less is more, and 'sabi', which means attentive melancholy, wabi-sabi refers to an awareness of the transient nature of earthly things and a corresponding pleasure in the things that bear the mark of this impermanence.

  • "I just think it's so beautiful - the beauty of imperfections, the lessons we can learn from our scars, the light let through the cracks of broken things. It's an extraordinarily wise and hopeful philiosophy. I couldn't help but borrow it."