Tikkun Olam (mezuzah) was curated into the 2017 Metalsmith Magazine Exhibition in Print: Repair and Renewal - Making Things Whole Again
Tikkun Olam (mezuzah) was curated into the 2017 Metalsmith Magazine Exhibition in Print: Repair and Renewal - Making Things Whole Again by Stuart Kestenbaum, director of Haystack School of Crafts in Maine."Soon after humans began making things, they began to repair them. In today’s high-tech world—where it’s challenging just to open up malfunctioning electronics, and it often costs more to repair than to buy a new product—the tradition and capacity for restoration has declined in our lives. This reparative spirit is still present among people who actually make things, however. Think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pots with gold, or a tinker patching pots and pans, or the improvisational work of a mechanic fixing an old car."
"Besides prolonging the life of the object, repair also speaks to our yearning to make things right again, to make things whole. Repairing is more than fixing—it’s a metaphorical way to look at the role of makers. When we repair things, are we also fixing ourselves? Can giving renewed life to objects and materials—perhaps ones that have had other functions—renew us as well? How does the world look when we say that what is broken can be made whole again, using ingenuity and imagination?"
"Stuart Kestenbaum is Maine’s poet laureate, an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council, and for many years served as the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine. He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Only Now (Deerbrook Editions) and The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a collection of brief essays on craft and community."
Stuart Kestenbaum, “Repair and Renewal: Making Things Whole Again”, Metalsmith, Curated Exhibition in Print, vol. 37, no.4, 2017, 17