Kintsugi. The Poetic Mend

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with a precious metal, usually gold, silver or platinum. The technique celebrates the history of the object and, rather than disguising a repair, highlights it and makes it beautiful.

Kintsugi has come to the West, where it found fertile ground through its kinship with the current trend of 'make do and mend', as well as for its lyrical metaphoric loading, which has been used in areas such as psychology and therapy, well-being, music, and emotional healing and spirituality. It is also being presented as a model for sustainability.