“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi
Inspired by the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where broken pottery is mended with gold, my work explores the concept that breakage does not end a story, but rather illuminates it. This project, born in 2018 from a period of personal reflection, has evolved into a broader inquiry into the universal human experience of trauma and recovery.
I am fascinated by a singular question: How do we reconstruct the self after profound loss? How do we mend the “inner landscape” of our emotions?
In this series, I examine the lives of figures who profoundly shaped our world yet struggled to find internal peace. Using hand-crafted clay sheets, a medium echoing the elemental “earth-to-earth” cycle of life, I created portraits of varying thicknesses to mirror the complexities of their personalities. The most transformative stage of this process is the deliberate act of breaking. In the fractures of the clay, I discovered a profound paradox: it is often in our brokenness that our true character and history are most vividly revealed.