Unfinished, Damaged and Broken

My mother has a table in her dining room. It’s the same one we had in our kitchen when I was growing up, and it bears the marks of three children learning to hammer, write and sew. Over the years, its joints have loosened, and the only way to keep the whole table from listing is to shim the centermost legs with cardboard. As the misshapen little squares of cardboard are compressed, they shimmy out of place, and get kicked across the hardwood floor. In a ritual-like process every few days she collects them all again, adding a new one from time to time, and props the table up again. In this way, she lives with this thing. I doubt it has ever crossed her mind to repair or replace it.

How many of us live with objects like this – things that don’t quite work anymore, or maybe never did, but we adapt to them and make them work, never noticing our own sometimes Herculean efforts to do so. It’s these little liabilities and handicaps that we live with every day, and the adjustments we make to accommodate them, that intrigue me.

I've been creating a body of work for a show next month at the Centrum Gallery at Oregon College of Art & Craft, and these are the ideas that are inspiring me. I'm exploring them in several ways, in addition to making more traditional jewelry (more on that later). Here are some more things I've been thinking about while producing this work:

Sometimes we just swaddle things that are broken, rather than mending them. We wrap them in layers of softness for protection. Or maybe we pin them together and keep on using them. Everything is fine. Denial.

What does it mean that so many of us get into the habit of starting things that we can’t, or don’t finish? We end up with the flotsam and jetsam of unfinishedness hanging all around us – eventually forming tangled barricades between us and the ability to complete anything. And when we know how good the accomplishment of finishing really feels, why do we procrastinate and handicap ourselves by constantly overfilling our plates?

When are things that are not whole still recognizable? How many, and which elements need to be there before we know the name of a thing? With objects, I think it is more obvious when a loss has occurred; when something is missing it’s a tangible thing. But there are a lot of people walking around with big chunks torn from themselves, and you still recognize them as people.

How many things do we have in our lives that fit the description of unfinished, damaged or broken? How many parts of ourselves can be described as such? We shove them in drawers and boxes, out of sight, and ignore them. But they are there, filling our inner worlds with imaginings of elements that finish them. Inside, we are striving to fill those voids all the time. When we turn our focus to them, we can mend them with little effort, and the clutter is cleared away. This is what meditation does for me.