Title: Kintsugi

Kintsugi; the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The cracks are not hidden. They are filled with something precious, and the object becomes more beautiful and more valuable for having been broken. Why I could not think of my scars that way. I had always hated scars. The sight of them made me feel faint. But I sat with that idea for a long time. In this self portrait, the gold runs across the dark background like lightning and fault lines. The doors in my chest are open. My heart is visible, threaded with gold. Some things take longer. If you look closely at where I have been broken, that is where the light gets in.