a centuries old tradition…
The art of Kintsugi is all about patience and follow-through. It’s extremely easy to start a kintsugi project. Anybody can start one with a $20 kit off the internet. But finishing one? It can be like finishing a marathon race.
It’s the 24hr enforced iteration cycle that gets people.
You have to wait 24 hours for the epoxy to dry between each joining session, so you can’t just binge it and marathon it in one go. What starts as a weekend project gets derailed as life happens. An interruption by an invitation to a holiday party or busted waterpipe in the bathroom causes the weekend project to slip, and suddenly you’ll get to it next month, then two months, then six. Maybe you or a roommate move. Suddenly it’s a year later, and you have a half-finished kintsugi project in a box.
For the novice kintsugi practitioner, it’s far easier to create a collection of half-finished kintsugi projects that floated from one apartment to the next and wind up getting put in the storage locker or garage, than it is to create a finished piece.
Curiously, it’s not more difficult to do multiple projects in parallel. When one sits down to do a glueing session; it’s as easy to do a half-dozen projects in an afternoon as it is to do a single project. So in the end, it’s really a craft that succeeds or fails based on project management and time management. There’s a dedication and discipline to it; that’s not necessarily captured by a 9-to-5 schedule. It’s an artisanal scheduling practice that’s unique to kintsugi and jig-saw puzzle hobbyists.
So, unless you’re already set up with an art studio, ask yourself the emotional and opportunity cost of not having the piece put back together in the next year or 5 years. Or the value of restoring that piece as a family heirloom, as a remembrance of the event that damaged it in the first place. And what the value would be to turn over a new leaf, and repair that which was broken. Trying to repair a failing marriage? Or a keepsake from a deceased friend or relative? That’s the value that we’re offering.
At Industrial Kintsugi, we’ve been practicing this art for 20 years, and getting to the point where the portfolio has begun coming together and we have the processes worked out. We look forward to adding more pieces to the portfolio as they are created in the upcoming years.
It all began with a…. dinosaur?
Indeed. My apprenticeship, where I learned the Kintsugi craft, was at the University of Chicago Department of Anatomy and Organismal Biology, and involved glueing together a 30,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that were the skeletons of Jobaria tiguidensis and Suchomimus tenerensis (now on permanent display at the Children’s Museum of Chicago).
Read more about how we reconstructed dinosaurs at the affectionately named Atomic Dino Lab, located at the Enrico Fermi Institute High Bay. While we were hoisting dinosaur casts with the 5T and 50T hoists, conducting carbon-14 dating, doing CT scans of skeletons, doing vacuum form molding, and otherwise assembling a 30,000 piece jigsaw puzzle; down the hall were clean rooms where other research teams were building orbital satellites, neutron detectors, small-bore MRI scanners, and other scientific instruments.
Later, I would move into more traditional kintsugi craft of dishware and pottery.
Abbie Watson
Kintsugi-shi