a repair process
december 30, 2023
my husband and i once went thrifting, and at a small goodwill in missouri, he found a blue sink frog. you know the things i'm talking about--little ceramic frogs with gaping mouths, usually made to hold steel wool or sponges. they're cute. he brought that frog home, and coined her Santa Rana ("Saint Frog"). our new companion was tasked with guarding our pocket change and bills until we needed it for ice cream, or until it gathered sufficiently enough to be worth depositing.
Santa Rana took a tumble a couple of weeks back during a stressful morning. the little frog shattered into several pieces, a mix of big and small. in this shattered state, there was no way for her to carry out her household duties. my husband gathered her pieces and puzzled them back together. enough of her pieces remained that she could be repaired, but it'd be a lot of work to make her look good, and not like a victim of gravity.
we live in a time where the things surrounding us are, for the most part, quite replaceable. most necessities and creature comforts are cheap and easily acquired. our little money frog could have been discarded and replaced. but we wanted to fix her, and i leaned into the art of kintsugi--the Japanese style of repairing broken pottery with gold. it's a beautiful philosophy, that treates chips, cracks, and holes like the object's gained experiences through its lifespan. instead of hiding repairs and making them as flush with the broken object as possible, gold (or other precious metal) highlights "flaws" and makes them stand out. the end results are gorgeous.
i'm a sucker for animism and anthropomorphizing objects, so kintsugi sits nicely with my worldview. plus, i'm sick of throwaway culture and the excess made possible by the industrial revolution and capitalism, at the cost of our planet and our souls. i'm also guilty of falling into "magical thinking" traps as part of ocd (and my husband also felt a little leery about whether the shattering of our money frog was a bad omen). hell, i thank my car for getting me to my destination safely. with this looming anxiety in mind, it became more imperitive to repair Santa Rana.
i have minimal (i cannot stress this enough, minimal) background in pottery or sculpting in general. the last time i seriously made something three dimensional out of any type of clay was in high school, and it exploded in the kiln. but i enjoy working with clay and sculpting a lot, when i get the opportunity. i knew i didn't want to mess with anything that would require baking. i also knew that most of the repairs would be accomplished with super glue, except for a big patch that could not be fitted back into place due to the way the ceramic broke.
i ended up choosing air-dry DAS paper clay. it seemed forgiving enough. for me, this ended up being the right choice. after gluing together the pices of Santa Rana that i could, i filled in missing pieces with paper clay patches. the nice thing about this clay is that it stuck pretty readily to the ceramic, even the smooth parts. it also didn't shrink much as it dried, so the patches stayed in place.
the most challenging part was sculpting a wing onto this back patch. i did not need to do this, but it added to Santa Rana's magical nature, and a wing may serve her well in the future. it was tough to get the shape right, and very tempting to keep working at it until it became an over-textured, misshapen mess. i remade that damn wing a few times until i felt satisifed with it. better done than perfect.
next, i got a bottle of metallic gold paint. i'm not a metalworker (though i'm thinking of taking a silversmithing class in the future soon) and don't have the money to spend on real gold, so to get the kintsugi look, paint would have to do. (again--better done than perfect.) as carefully as i could, i painted over the dried clay and added flourish to the cracks that were still visible.
finally, i wanted to acknowledge the symbolic meaning Santa Rana took on in our house. she is, after all, the guardian of our money, and she holds it in her belly until we need it. to make sure she would never be hungry again, i super-glued a wheat penny into the base of her stomach. she will never starve, but she'll never be so full that we won't have money to provide her with.
all in all, i think she turned out good.
i'm sharing about this process because honestly, with a bit of thought and consideration, it wasn't difficult to complete. in retrospect i wish i had taken photos of the repair process from beginning to end, but i didn't intend on making this into a full-fledged post. she doesn't look perfectly the same as before she broke, nor should she. Santa Rana has a history, and it's partially reflected in her physical form--like living beings. next time you break something, give repairing it a shot, instead of tossing it into an ever-growing landfill.