Kintsugi
“Cooperation”, from Kintsugi, a photo book by Martyna Benedyka
Between Walls
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle
William Carlos Williams
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage. After my recent surgeries, I thought of the concept of kintsugi as a perfect technique to mend my body and soul. This work allowed me to accept the “precious” scars I was left with and treat each of them as a unique break that would soon be filled. The objects and their shapes correspond with each other in a similar way to our body and being. It is a never ending conversation of similarities and opposites. The shape of the blanket which I had with me in the hospital evokes associations with hair that rest silently on a pillow or a bridge that can be translated into a unification of soft emotions, memories, and places that are hidden within us.
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Martyna Benedyka was born in 1991 in Gdynia, near the Baltic Sea. She is a Polish vocalist and visual artist working in various media including painting, photography, collage, installation, video, and sound art. She studied Art and Design at the Gray’s School of Art in Scotland, UK and graduated with a First Class BA degree with honors in Fine Art Painting in 2014. She has exhibited in the UK, Poland, Romania, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and the US. Her work has been chosen by the Federation of British Artists for the Futures, the UK’s largest annual survey of emerging contemporary figurative art at the Mall Galleries in London, among others.