“Kintsugi | Reasons Behind the Scars” is an exhibition of the unplanned – a testament to efforts that are, in their simple defiance of what we meant to do, a small sense of the unrepeatable. Featuring 12 ceramic works by the Mexican potter Perla Valtierra that were broken years ago and nearly discarded, the pieces suggest also an open-ended inquiry into what it means to transform, not only in appearance but in substance – from effort to acceptance, and, perhaps someday, from perfection to celebration, “of life and everything that happened, everything I have been through, and what things are coming, again,” Valtierra says.

More than ten years ago, Valtierra went to Japan on a scholarship to research ceramics, and embarked on a period of intensive study of the Japanese language. Upon her return to Mexico, after a period in Europe, she began her eponymous pottery line, which is carried in stores worldwide. In her first shipment to a retailer in Japan, some pieces arrived broken, devastating Valtierra who had packaged the pieces with special attention because of the importance of the country in her study.

In the meantime, Arisa Nishino, who had taught Valtierra the Japanese language many years ago, had returned to Japan and studied to become a kintsugi practitioner, repairing broken ceramics in the traditional method with urushi and decorates the repaired part with gold and silver, that highlights or blends in the damage rather than disguising it. It takes over months to get repaired like a scar to be cured. Valtierra’s chipped and damaged pottery – including pieces of larger scale – became a means for reunion, and an accident that denotates the non-linear progression both of Valtierra’s work and of her life. “It’s not that I brought broken pieces to Japan,” Valtierra notes of the sheer convergence of events and perceptual shifts that made this exhibition possible. “And maybe we do not have the same thing in Mexico, but in a way we do – in the way I grew up, not throwing things away, more rural and with a father who taught me this countryside campesino way of life, and how to relate to the beauty of an object.”

Kintsugi | Reasons Behind the Scars