Kintsugi: Brokenness, Strength and Beauty, excerpt of the conversation with Nobuko Okamoto

This is a very short 5 minute excerpt of the conversation with Nobuko Okamoto about Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery using gold – we reflected on what it might mean for each of us and our lives and parts that might be broken.  

“The thing that strikes me about this technique of Kintsugi is that if we think about our lives, so often there are broken parts in our lives – and it is easy to push them aside and say “I don’t want to deal with that brokenness” or that pain or whatever it is.  And the model that you are using is to say, “we can repair things and we can regognise that there is brokenness but that there can be beauty in the brokenness” – and by using Gold it is actually emphasising the places where the pottery was broken – and sometimes in our lives, well we don’t want to talk about the broken things but in the same way we can be repaired, we can be fixed as well, and it can be something that even is celebrated, that it actually leads to some new life for this object … or this person. It is a beatiful thing.”

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Photos by Nobuko Okamoto of work she has done – visit her instagram for many more amazing ones. https://www.instagram.com/nobu.kintsugi/?hl=en 

For more interviews visit www.theseeds.nz 

You can download this episode here.