Dunting kintsugi experiment

 A bad batch of clay led several folks in my salt and soda firing class to have cracking issues with clay, called dunting. It can be painful to invest so much time into a piece, have so much hope for how it will look once fired, and then have your pot crack in the kiln. And I don’t mean a simple small crack, with dunting the pot literally tears itself apart over a period of a few weeks. The dunting god hit one of my pots,  it started slowly cracking as we unloaded it from the kiln. From a geek perspective, it was interesting to watch. My pot ended up in 16 pieces! 

I decided to try a Japanese technique called kintsugi on the pieces. Kintsugi is the process of repairing a pot by highlighting the broken breaks with seams of gold. It is a way of preserving the memories of the pot, and in wabi sabi fashion, embracing its brokenness. I spent some time googling DIY kintsugi, and decided on using gold colored mica and E6000 glue. Real kintsugi costs tons of $$ and is a hard process. I just wanted to preserve the memory of a wonderful class where we struggled with pots being struck down randomly in the kiln. 

It took a surprisingly amount of planning. I had to figure out the order to glue pieces such that I didn’t accidentally end up with a piece that wouldn’t fit in because of an odd angle in the break, and I also had to plan the order such that I could get the piece to balance on its own while it cured. I used play sand to help keep pieces at an angle needed while drying, and did a little gluing each day. With so many pieces, it was helpful to mark the edges that needed gluing each bit I did. 

It was a fun project, and now I’ll tuck this little guy up on a shelf, and smile when I see it, because it will remind me of the awesome class I got to take.