Unfinished, Damaged & Broken
In 2002, I started a body of work that would become known later as “Unfinished, Damaged and Broken.” I invited friends and colleagues to empty their caches of objects they had held on to – sometimes for decades – though they were unfinished, damaged or broken. I have been mending, repurposing and protecting these and other objects like them ever since.
The inspiration for this body of work came like a thunderbolt when I was caring for my mother in her home after open heart surgery. My mother had a table in her dining room. It was the same one we had in our kitchen when I was growing up, and it bore the marks of three children learning to hammer, paint and sew. Over the years, its joints have loosened, and the way she kept the whole table from listing was to shim the legs with cardboard. As the misshapen little squares of cardboard were compressed, they would shimmy out of place and get kicked across the hardwood floor. In a ritual-like process every few days she would collect them all, adding a new one from time to time, and prop the table up again. In this way, she had learned to live with this thing. I doubt it ever crossed her mind to actually repair or replace it.
So many of us live in relationships – with objects and people – like this. We know they don’t quite function anymore (or maybe never did) but we adapt to them and make them work, never noticing the intricate rituals we have developed to do so. These little liabilities that we live with every day are what intrigue me.
What makes things that are no longer whole still recognizable? How many, and which elements need to be present before we know the name of a thing? With objects, I think it is more obvious when a loss has occurred; when something is missing or broken - it’s a tangible thing. But there are a lot of people walking around with big chunks torn out of themselves, and you can’t see it at all.
As I continue to age and weather the storms of life with my own body and spirit, my devotion to exploring this series continues to deepen. Here are some of my favorite pieces from the collection to date:
