I was furnishing an apartment for rent here in NYC and went straight to that giant furniture and knick-knack store – which you assemble at home, like LEGO for adults. To my delight, I found some beautiful, inexpensive ceramics that would make the little apartment much more charming. A pink, opaque, textured vase cost about US$12. What a find!
Since I make ceramics in my spare time, I also felt a certain discomfort. I know how much work it takes, the amount of trial and error, the surprise failures during firing and… the charm of a handmade object. At that moment, I also thought of wabi-sabi : a Japanese aesthetic concept that focuses on accepting imperfection. Or, another way of saying it: wabi-sabi is the philosophical ideal that sees beauty in that which “went wrong”. In the best Zen style, this vision values the artisanal, the mark of what is human and not industrial (or digital). In the world of wabi-sabi, a vase made on an assembly line is not at all attractive.
In this sense, I wonder if what is handmade interests me more because it also brings – albeit indirectly – the imperfect stories of everyone who participated in that process. After all, we know: there are handmade things that are “perfect”, right? Just like a signature, handmade things carry the unique mark of whoever made that object. We can try to make it the same, but… it will always be just similar.
Incorporating the mistake or the unique mark of the maker's hand as part of success is so fundamental that we could even think about the relationship between the word success and the word succession. A succession of trials and errors is what ultimately leads to success.
Nowadays, one of the rules in my house is that only handmade ceramic plates, cups and bowls are allowed. When I have my coffee in the morning, that cup keeps me company. It’s not the cheap one that allows us to change the cup with each sip of coffee - and of course I’ve had many of those - but the charm, the content, the aura and the wabi-sabi of these objects make my mornings more meaningful. Whoever made it matters. And if it breaks… there’s no other like it.
