FRANCINE SCHLOETHF / SWITZERLAND

Pendant, Lost I, 2019
foam, plaster, metal powder, sterling
silver, textile
cast, Kintsugi, paint, fabricated

«we’re stronger in the places we’re broken» Ernest Hemingway
For my pieces I used the technique of Kintsugi to make the invisible visible
and show the damaged part. In 2017 I learned about this technique during my
studies of Japanese lacquer in Kyoto, Japan.
Kintsugi means golden joinery , also known as Kintsukuroi – golden repair – the
Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with
lacquer , dusted or mixed with powdered gold , silver , or platinum .
As a philosophy , it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an
object, to become beautiful.
My pieces are part of the series of «lost and found» that I made specially for
Broken Beauty. Repairing the broken part means re-found, I imagine them from a
collection found somewhere and repaired by someone….