The Shattering

If I were to describe what happened on the evening of May 27, 2015 as a tragedy some people might say I experienced a “first world” problem… “You broke some plates? Well last month I broke the screen on my iPhone and couldn’t tweet pictures of my food for two days!”

That being said, for someone who has invested hours, months, years of creative inspiration into a set of artwork only to see a significant percentage of that effort destroyed in a matter of seconds… well, that can qualify as a bit of a personal tragedy.

I learned the hard way that a shelf is only as good as the screws that hold it to the wall, and similar to the straw that broke the camel’s back, you can find the plate that is one too many for a shelf holding some of your best artwork.

For me, that was a new set of plates fresh out of the kiln, the next eight plates in my Naturalization series. I wanted to put them somewhere safe before I took pictures of them, so I added them to the already-loaded shelf not realizing that the eighth plate was indeed the final straw.

The meager little screws gave way and in about three seconds I had more than 30 porcelain plates and tiles laying in a jumble of sharp little shards at my feet.

Shattered Soul

I refer to the events of that night as “The Shattering.”

This is both a literal and figurative description as my creative spirit was just as broken and jumbled as the plates. It’s taken me almost a year to even write about the event, but it’s not been an idle year. After leaving them in place on the floor for nearly a week, I carefully gathered the shattered pieces into different piles and began rearranging the puzzle pieces into individual boxes. From there I experimented with different methods of reassembling the pieces and firing them in the kiln on flat porcelain backing pieces to create an all new piece.

The result is my Shattered series, a set of  reclaimed pieces that in some ways are more representative of the human experience than anything I have done before. For me they represent the fragile beauty of mankind and nature, our innocence to the world and exposure to pain that can break us and yet give us the opportunity to come back stronger, harder, and sharper from our experiences.

While I have not yet restarted my work on the Naturalization series in the ten months after The Shattering, I have completed a number of Shattered works and still have the pieces of another eight plates and numerous daffodil tiles waiting to be transformed into this new stage in their lives.

Breaking Pieces on Purpose

In the meantime, I’ve also experimented sparingly with purposefully shattering a handful of perfectly good postcard-sized pieces to see what that evokes both in the pieces and in me. The results have been intriguing and give me much to think about for my artistic direction.

So welcome to this bruised, tender part of my soul that continues through the healing process, and welcome to the Shattered series of Pop Art Porcelain — may we all rise from the depths of our personal tragedies to evolve into wiser and sharper versions of ourselves.

And in case you were wondering, yes, my first step on the road to recovery was replacing little screws with heavy duty toggle bolts to keep my shelves in place.