We love to share what's happening in our visual art classrooms! This week, the spotlight is on Mr. John Hentz's Gr 6 class and a special technique called "Kintsugi."

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer. As students began this project, they first designed and created their "perfect" pinch pots. Next, a hammer was taken to their pots, undoing all their efforts and literally breaking the pots into pieces. The final phase was to patiently restore the broken pots using the gold lacquer. And yet, this was not the end of the project.

It was so much more than learning how to mend a broken pot. Mr. Hentz asked students to then reflect on the experience through writing, connecting it to their own lives and their experiences with brokenness, disappointment, or loss. And taking it even one step further, he asked them to reflect upon the ways God is able to mend our own brokenness and create something new and beautiful. Here are a few things the students shared.

"This project means that problems can always be solved, and every broken thing can be fixed. A valuable lesson I learned from this project is whenever things feel like they are broken, God will always be there for me and fix them. My perfect pinch pot is a metaphor for 'For God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only son' because even though the world is a broken place, God will always love it and put it back together. A similarity I can see between Kintsugi and Jesus’ life is when the pottery is glued back together with gold, it relates to His resurrection from the dead."  –Caroline Meyer

"This project meant to me that broken things can be fixed and hurt things can be healed. I was really sad when I had to break my perfect pinch pot, but I am glad that I got to put it back together. A lesson I learned is that once things are broken, it is hard to put them back together. And when you’re mean, it is hard to make it better. But things can be fixed and made better. My perfect pinch pot metaphor is that God can take the broken pieces and use them to make me stronger. It also must be hard for God to see His creation hurting." –Anonymous

"This lesson made me think of when I had to change from my old school to CHCA. I had a tough time letting go of my old friends and deciding that I should make new friends. It felt like my life had shattered into pieces. I eventually mended my shattered life and started talking to kids in class and saying hi... It is different (like a repaired pinch pot) from when I was at my old school, but at CHCA I have made amazing new friends, and I have mended my pot. In Psalm 147:2-4 it says: 'The Lord builds up Jerusalem; He gathers the exiles of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of stars and calls them each by name.' That shows how the Lord can work to help us with Kintsugi in our lives." –Clara Dale

Pictured below are several Kintsugi pots created by our Gr 6 art students.