Not Quite Kintsugi

I embrace the concept of wabi-sabi (侘寂) because I'm a terrible woodworker and it allows me to create things like this and call them bespoke.

Kintsugi gets invoked a lot for pieces like this, but I think wabi-sabi is the closer fit. Kintsugi is about the visible repair of a break, wabi-sabi is the broader appreciation of imperfection itself. IOW, the story is about building a life worth living starting from the fact that beauty if often found in imperfections as opposed to something broken but fixed.

Why are we often attracted to things with imperfections? I think what's happening is that we're extremely tuned pattern-detectors, and perfection is a pattern anomaly just as much as damage is. Almost nothing in the natural world is truly symmetrical or flawless — faces, trees, stones, even the "identical" grain in two boards from the same log. So when we encounter something that is flawless, some part of us reads it as artificial before we've consciously figured out why. Robotics researchers coined "uncanny valley" for the specific version of this -- a robot or CGI face that's almost-but-not-quite human doesn't read as impressive, it reads as wrong, because it's close enough to trigger our human-recognition circuitry but off in ways we can't always name. I think a "too perfect" object does something similar on a smaller scale -- it doesn't look handmade or lived-in, it looks like it's performing handmade-ness, and we feel that gap even when we can't articulate it.

There's also probably an economic layer to it -- in a world of injection-molded, laser-cut, machine-sanded everything, flawless has become cheap. Perfection used to be a sign of skill; now it's a sign of a CNC machine. Imperfection has become the tell that a human hand and a specific piece of wood were actually involved, which is maybe why we've started to prize it rather than hide it.

Re comments on your containers. I like them, and the story. In fact, I have a couple in mind where I think that would be an appropriate gift, and story. I can't make something like that, but I think I still have a covered vase given to to me while I was in Japan that was chipped during shipment to the states. That was a bummer, but not near so much as the thousands of slides I took while there that were lost when submitted for developing and never found. Shyt.