A Mending Art

This past weekend, at the invitation of a dear friend and Episcopal priest, I spent five days in Paradise, California. In 2018, Paradise was almost completely destroyed by The Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history. Today, Paradise and the surrounding areas continue the long, hard work of disaster recovery.

My role was to welcome people into a space of mending through music and Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold. Kintsugi instruction became part of my artistic practice in 2021 through , and over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to work with almost a hundred people and their pieces.

For me, Kintsugi has become a metaphor for my life as an artist. Unlike most of my musician friends, I didn’t go to music school or sign a publishing deal. Instead, I studied international relations, was an intelligence analyst, and moved from DC to Nashville to New York to try to make music and a living, sometimes even driving for Uber to make creative ends meet. I constantly felt like my career was a fragmented mess. Kintsugi gave me eyes to see that the diverse pieces of my experience could be mended into something imperfectly unique and beautiful. Kintsugi has also given visual presence to my songs like “Gold in the Dirt,” “In Between,” “Smoke and Fire,” and “New Communions.”