An accident happens so easily.

Eve Ferguson collects milk jugs, sort of. It was a particular shame that this one broke, since it was given her by someone once very close. It’s a very small and delicate jug, with an almost hand made feel to it. Given the narrative it already carried in a poetic way, I wanted to fix it, but without repairing it. Some things you can’t just glue back together again, but then again, maybe that’s also ok? So I decided to help it instead of mending it, by adding a kind of support that would make it useful again. I used fired and glazed clay, to keep with the original material, but made the supporting structure a separate piece. I also wanted to make it as light and unobtrusive as possible, so as not to take the attention from the fineness of the jug, but still in an honest way showing what is broken.

A kind of handle prosthesis maybe?

I often get back to what an amazing material ceramics is. It breaks so easily, but the pieces last almost forever. That is why archaeologists use pottery shards to date almost all old pre-literal civilizations. You can be certain that the pieces of broken clay pots you find around an old settlement date from around the same time as they were deposited, since everyday cutlery didn’t survive the challenges of the bronze age kitchen any better than they do our modern ones. But once broken, the shards can still be dug out 4000 years later, pieced together and analyzed for patterns and decorating techniques. The changing fashions in pottery design then help the curious archaeologist date the vase and the site of the find. Maybe us humans and our relationships function in a similar way. Relationships break all to easily, but the broken pieces and traces could be understood just as well by another human being thousands of years later, since all that changes in human nature is the fashion on the surface.

Title on the bottom, where it’s present but out of sight.

Object no. 3