I made the pot shown above last
February. During the final firing one of its corners warped and lifted the foot
attached to it off the ground. The effect was awful. I was about to throw the
pot away when one of the potters in the studio said: “If you don’t want it,
I’ll take it”. That made me pause, and then my ceramics teacher challenged me
to come up with a solution to fix it. The solution came when I remembered a
story about a Japanese tea master who adhered to wabi sabi aesthetics so sternly that he would smash tea bowls and
then glue them back together to meet the criteria of "imperfect,
impermanent and incomplete". I didn’t smash my pot though, just cut the
crooked leg off (image below right).
The traditional Japanese technique of
repairing ceramics called kin-tsugi is to glue broken parts with shellac
and then apply gold powder while it is still wet. It makes repaired seams
appear as gold lines. Some of the European bonsai pot makers took this
tradition to the next level and repaired their pots with pure gold (see http://www.bonsaipots.net/index.php?page=gold-and-ceramics).
Well, I took it down a notch and glued my pot with a two-part epoxy glue and
then applied gold nail polish while it was still wet. Both epoxy and nail polish
are acetone solvable and combine really well. The nail polish I used contains some epoxy as well, which adds to their compatibility. Another upside is that epoxy is really
strong and weather resistant. You can see different stages of my take on kin-tsugi below.
