Fragment

Noun: A small part broken off or separated from something. Verb: Break or cause to break into fragments.

I’ve been thinking about how our Western culture seems wired to rally against things being broken, or things falling apart. Whether it’s physical things like broken dishwashers, or our bodies when we are ill, or mental states like when we feel loss or confusion, or states of existence when life throws us a challenge which we haven’t yet adapted to, we see “whole, known, complete” as being optimal, and we see “broken” as equating to damage, “chaotic and messy” perceived as troublesome, challenging, something to be “got through.” Broken is a generally experienced as a threat, and signifies a loss.

As my contribution to the The Things We Hold In Our Hands Participatory Project, I had the idea of making a multi-faceted form out of a much loved wooden jigsaw. I wrote about how much I enjoyed handling the pieces of wooden jigsaws in an earlier post - the colours, weight and preciseness of the pieces make for a lovely sensory experience, and bringing the pieces together; letting them find their homes next to each other, contributes to something we all need: a sense of mending and putting back together. But recently, as I was working on one puzzle, a beautiful Breughel, I started thinking about how nice it would be to hold a heavy, multi-faceted form made of these pieces, perhaps made more weighty still with plaster.

Lured by the sense of the object in my head/hands, and remembering my earlier commitment to follow the smallest intuition, I set about glueing the pieces of the puzzle together, to form a sheet.