My mother, unknowingly to both of us, introduced me to wabi sabi when i was about sixteen years old. She was a deeply creative person who struggled with the technical aspects of her creativity. Her creativity was emotional and intuitive. There was nothing intellectual about it.  At the time, she was exploring ceramics and throwing cups, jugs, bowls and vases on a potter’s wheel and making ceramic statues. The statues were of children or, more ambitiously, ceramic dioramas from Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream‘. She’d studied set design in London and these three dimensional creations were, I think, the nexus of her beloved but distant childhood, frustrations from a never-pursued career and an inherent need to make things and stay busy.

I walked into her workshop one morning and stopped by the old galvanised iron bin that she threw rejects into – pots that had exploded in the kiln, busts where the likeness didn’t please her, or cups where the glaze had bubbled into weird pustules as if a medieval plague had been visited upon them. 

Sitting on the top of the pile of broken attempts was half of a small child’s face. I picked it up and was immediately drawn to it. The upper half of the head had been blown away, as had the entire back, just leaving the face below the eyes and down to the chin. From the corner of the right eye, running down the face, disappearing where the cheek formed a cleft with the mouth, was a single crack that looked like the path of a tear. She explained that she had spent days getting the bust of one of her granddaughters ‘right’ and then it had exploded in the kiln leaving her  frustrated and disappointed. I liked it. In it’s fragmented state it seemed to hold all the temporality, tenderness, innocence, happiness and unhappiness of being a child. The cracked path of the ‘tear’ was completely accidental, forged in the heat of the kiln,  but deeply moving. It reminded me of an artefact from an ancient civilisation, hinting at a lost wholeness and of another time. It spoke more as a fragment than it could possibly have if it had left the kiln an unscathed, faithful replica of a family member. Now it resembled no one and everyone.

Decades later, I still have the Broken Face. It sits on my desk. And it still gives rise to the same feelings of melancholy, loss, and impermanence that I felt, but didn’t know how to articulate, when I was a teenager.

Months later my mother was grappling with glazing her pots. She found the mathematical precision required to get the glaze she wanted baffling and alien to her intuitive and impulsive way of working. To try and better understand the complex art of ceramic glazing she had bought a book on Japanese ceramics and discovered in its pages the concept of wabi sabi: pots, teapots, cups, plates, all deliberately left with cracks, crooked lips and glazing imperfections to produce the wabi sabi effect. The effect that gives rise,  to a ‘serene melancholy and spiritual longing’ by acknowledging that ‘nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect’. 

My mother flew over the more intellectual and spiritual significance of wabi sabi. For her, it provided the rationale to save a good percentage of work that would otherwise be thrown away as too ‘imperfect’ and also offered her an explanation for her entire approach to creativity; her aesthetic (although this is a word that she would never have used.) For her it was the rough earthiness of clay rather than the smooth delicacy of porcelain. It was intuitive, organic, avoided attempts at perfection or sophistication, celebrated the rough and rustic and invited you to enjoy the simple and essential.