Gluing the Pieces Together

I have tried informing Christies that I don't want their jewelry catalogs, nor their antiques. I could do without the Orientalist sales as well, but that would be too perilous of an exclusion, lest they mistake Middle Eastern Art for contemporary Orientalism!

The antiques, cars, jewelry, carpet and Orientalist catalogs go straight to the recycling bin. But it so happened that my seventh grader got a collage assignment for his school-by-correspondence and I immediatly remembered the freshly arrived otherwise useless for me Chrities jewlery and antiques catalogs.

We considered the Porcelain, Furniture and Decorative arts to cut out of. The assignment required him, thus me as well, to think of an object and cut smaller elements of that object and glue them to make a larger whole. We immediatly thought of a porcelain plate, shattered in hundreds of pieces, and glued back together.

So we went about cutting cups and saucers, Sevres trays, with flowers and landscapes, all ranging from 2 thousand to 12 thousand dollars, asking price. We fragmented the plates, the tea pots and the vases. My son drew the contour of a decorative, hexagonal platter and we were now trying to put the varied and mixed fragments of paper, representing porcelain, to form a whole.

The task was a lot easier than our simplest puzzles. My son grew up with puzzles and I am a big fan. Here, with scissors, we could cut shapes to fit into others. Neither one of us has ever been skilled with scissors so the edges of the attained platter now look rather sharp and the interior does have some hidden empty spaces of "no porcelain". We tried to mismatch the assembly as much as we could, so the contrasts of colors, the symmetrical representations of human forms and of flowers be respected too.

Voila! Who said that the porcelain couldn't be glued back together? We have now both studied the intricacies and the beauty of porcelain.

That catalog had a different fate.