Mend-Patch-Repair: Making Art Out of Everyday Life
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Just as the ancient art of kintsugi elevates broken objects, here, reclaiming worn and damaged items is celebrated as a form of art.
- Taiwanese artist Wu Yu Jung "performs" mending on clothing. This video captures his time at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. - Taipei-born, Yale-educated Lee Mingwei created The Mending Project. - Some artists, such as quilter Heidi Parkes, include mending as another creative outlet. - A few use art to document repairs, as Tony May did in his 2003 acrylic painting (at left). - Some artists cleverly and playfully mend, patch, and repair items without calling it art, as in Janet Burdick's appliqué below. - Many others artfully repair and reclaim household items. An example is the pant leg above, with patch-on-patch (at the knee) by Charles Pioli, a master builder in Salt Lake City. |
MENDDetail of a Confradía Tzute (head cloth worn by men during ceremonies, San Juan Sacatepéquez, Guatemala) shows fine mending. Tzute woven in the 1920s.
Photo by: Amy Brown 
MENDThis sheet caught on a corner of a fold-out bed when my sister visited with her second husband. Mended in the early 1980s by Anna Koster and used in the years since.
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PATCHAppliqué dots on a pillow case: One dot covers a small stain. The other creates balance and keeps the first dot company. Patches by Janet Burdick.
PATCHBill Kirkpatrick's 2.5-inch patch covers a rip where barbed wired caught his pants when he was volunteering for the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority.
Photo by Anna Koster. |
REPAIRThe teapot sports a handmade bead replacing the knob that was shattered when the lid fell to the floor. The bead is attached with a bit of salvaged cord.
Repair made by Anna Koster, 2019. 
REPAIRAnother colorful bead, attached with a cord, replaces the pull tab of a zipper on this fleece jacket. Bead, repair, and photo made by Anna Koster.
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Here, we elevate the lowly tasks of reclaiming items that are damaged or worn. With mindfulness, we can refocus our too-busy lives in this single-use-throw-away culture as we apply the healing arts of mending, patching, and repairing.
The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi is consistent with the current mending movement.
"If one general statement can be made about the art of our times, it is that one by one the old criteria of what a work of art ought to be have been discarded in favor of a dynamic approach in which everything is possible." – Peter Selz (1919-2019) German-born American art historian, Art in Our Times (1981)
"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. … The idea becomes the machine that makes the art." — Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum, Summer 1967
"Ideas alone can be works of art….All ideas need not be made physical.…A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s." – Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), American artist, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," in Art and Its Significance, edited by Stephen David Ross (1994)
The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi is consistent with the current mending movement.
"If one general statement can be made about the art of our times, it is that one by one the old criteria of what a work of art ought to be have been discarded in favor of a dynamic approach in which everything is possible." – Peter Selz (1919-2019) German-born American art historian, Art in Our Times (1981)
"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. … The idea becomes the machine that makes the art." — Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum, Summer 1967
"Ideas alone can be works of art….All ideas need not be made physical.…A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s." – Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), American artist, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," in Art and Its Significance, edited by Stephen David Ross (1994)