Glen Martin Taylor
Glen Martin Taylor is a ceramic artist, who specializes in the Japanese traditional ceramic technique Kintsugi.
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of seeking beauty from imperfections by mending broken ceramics with gold lacquer. Glen has taken this one step further by incorporating an array of unusual found objects with broken porcelain pieces, some of which carry strong personal emotional significance.
He uses china plates from his grandmother which are broken up, the missing pieces replaced by barbed wire and rusty chains, resulting in objects which look delicate and menacing at the same time. In another series discarded baby shoes are bound tightly to pieces of broken porcelain, adding a large dose of melancholy. Other unexpected found objects used include nails, cutlery and old newspapers. |
These objects may have not have been "repaired" in the conventional sense, but their lost functionality has certainly been more than made up for by their spellbinding beauty and emotional impact.
If in Kintsugi’s art the only important part is that of repair, for Glen the act of reassembling objects is as important as that of destroying them. Through these two phases, the artist frees his emotions and confronts them by creating objects that will eventually have lost their primary purpose, but not their importance