A Handful of Dust – the intrinsic flaws in art

As an artist I have always searched for the imperfection in an artwork. Perhaps imperfection isn’t quite the right term to use – let’s call it the ‘flaw’ or ‘fault’ in a work of art. The ‘intrinsic flaw’ in the nature of the work that defines it – its actual character.

Plato suggests that this “flaw or weakness” is the hardest to achieve. Too often works of art are overworked and in doing so they remove all traces of the flaw – “lose the spontaneity and vibrancy in the marble.”  Often it’s in the material itself, in my case the way that some of the rods in my kinetic sculptures bend in one direction, while others fall another way. The way that colours change in the environment that they occupy.

Robyn Griggs Lawrence wrote recently about the Japanese tradition called Wabi–sabi (no not Wasabi !) that celebrates the beauty in what is flawed. “The singular beauty in something that may first look wrong or flawed. Wabi-sabi reminds us that we are all transient beings— which our bodies, as well as the material world around us, are in the process of returning to dust.

Nature’s cycles of growth, decay, and erosion are embodied in frayed edges.  In Wabi-sabi we learn to embrace both the glory and the melancholy found in these marks of passing time.”

By embracing imperfections in our lives we come closer to understanding ourselves, our environment and our end.

Konstantin Dimopoulos
February 2009