When it breaks it breaks in a thousand pieces.

This pretty Japanese vase, from the thirties or forties is my personal guess, completely shattered in an accident involving a cat and a niece in Pat Whitten’s sitting room.Rather than bemoaning it, she took it to the art repair shop, where she suggested maybe I could use it for a mosaic. I agreed, since the pieces all had pretty colors and image fragments, but the problem was that many of the larger pieces were still very curved. It didn’t feel right to smash the porcelain in even smaller bits just to be able to fit them on a flat surface, since I am here to repair and not to break, so I decided to try out a different kind of mosaic.

Three dimensional.

While retaining the original shape of the vase, I added a piece of fictional story, an action, of growing and bursting from the inside instead of being smashed from the outside. We built up an oddly shaped entity inside the vase, which, being unable to contain it, cracked and burst. Is this clumsy ceramic body growing from within the accumulated stress and frustrations of a society outgrowing its traditional image, or is it an attempt by the young niece to fix a broken vase?

If the vase had been part of nature, would it then be a seed capsule cracking open?

What is decorative, the mass produced (but most likely still hand painted) pieces of a porcelain vase or the handmade clay vessel now hiding within it? Maybe the contrast? The vase was pretty, but would probably have been overlooked in a room with other decorative furnishings and details. Now it stands out, but can definitely not be considered pretty. The work put into making a ceramic shell on the inside was very complicated, since clay shrinks when it is fired, demanding of us that we foresee the changes the material goes through during the whole process, but does the hours of careful work and then corrections add up to an increased value or not? For me, this piece is asking a lot of questions relevant to art.

Now it’s signed with more than just “Mada in Japan”.

Maybe what is uncontrollable about the growth, is not that it is breaking out of its confinement, but rather that anytime you embark on a creative project, you allow the entangled variables to become so loose that they might fly off and alter the very premises you are working from.

Object no. 22