The beauty of imperfection: my first attempt at the Japanese art of Kintsugi

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.― Salvador Dali

For my birthday back in May, I got this beautiful handmade cup which was made by Absolutely Clay. I’d not even had it a month, and I accidentally knocked it off the table and onto the hard floor, where it inevitably cracked into pieces.

It’s such a beautiful one off piece of art, there was no way I was going to throw it away, so I attempted to repair it with gold, which is a Japanese tradition called Kintsugi (or golden repair).

If you’re unfamiliar with Kintsugi, is’s an ancient Japanese art form, which involves repairing broken ceramic pottery with gold. In doing this, the imperfections are celebrated rather than hidden.

Materials

If you’re interested in trying this out, here are the materials I used:

• Epoxy resin (I used Gorilla 25ml epoxy pack of two from Amazon which was more than enough to do the whole cup)

• Metallic powdered mica pigment
• Old paintbrush

When I looked into how to do it, there were quite a few different methods and as you can see, I’m no pro, but this is how I did it.

Here’s my first attempt at Kintsugi explained in 3 steps

1.I simply mixed equal parts epoxy resin to gold powder. The resin I bought came with the resin and the hardener, so when squeezed, they came out together as opposed to having to buy them separately.

2. Using an old paintbrush, I then mixed in the gold powder and very carefully painted along the first crack. The stuff I bought dried really fast so I had to be quite quick. 

3. I then held the pieces together for several minutes, at which point the gold became visible on the outside. This whole process was then repeated until the mug had been repaired. I then painted over some areas with extra gold to finish.