After my mom passed away, I turned to drugs and alcohol. My life spiralled up and down for many years. I was in and out of recovery since 2004. My stuff went into storage and moved from place to place. Things got lost, damaged and broken. I finally got a place of my own fourteen years ago. However, I kept partying and didn't care about belongings, only my addiction. I've been clean and sober-minded for eight years now. I held onto this broken native spirit. Now it has a new life and purpose. We may be broken, but never destroyed. We can be repaired and given purpose.

I mended it with a broken music player I got from the Goodwill store. I patched the bottom with leather and anchored it with jewelry wire. There were a few broken jewelry pieces I had around and decided to incorporate within the piece. This project was emotional for me. I never threw out the broken native figure because it belonged to my mother. Today, it has new life and beauty within the brokenness. The Mending Project by Lee Mingwei inspired me to tell a story.

you’ve have a man ripping some poor dude’s skull out. I’m quite proud how it turned out. Simple and easy. Special thanks for Jan Vormann and his work Dispatchwork as an inspiration when it comes to using things laying around your bedroom.

I knew I wanted to do something with this project that would capture that feeling of dancing in the summer sun. The first step was to take them apart and clean off the decaying backs of the leather (pleather?) straps. I used heavy duty scissors that I bought for working with cardboard.

Rather than sketching in advance, I took the pieces and moved them around on a table to experiment with creating different rhythms and line and shapes just by rearranging the pieces. Once I had an idea of a composition that felt dynamic and asymmetrically balanced, I pulled out my heavy duty cardboard stapler and some armature wire. Through experimentation, I realized that stapling the wire to the pieces of pleather, and not twisting the wire, would allow me to move the pleather along the wire, even after assembly. This appealed to me because having a piece that can be constantly changed (and somewhat kinetic) enhanced the connection to the feeling of dancing.

I first tried a flat presentation against the wall, starting with the composition that I developed flat on the table. Then I decided that a more three-dimensional composition would be even more dynamic, so I moved the piece to the table and played with the armature wire until I found a composition that created the movement and balance that felt like it reflected the emotion I wanted to portray.

In short I had a bunch of sea glass I wasn't doing anything with. inspired by the kintsugi spoken about in class and finding it pretty sad that these were once part of many different types of bottles I figured why not make a new type of container with them (freeing up some space in the process). utilizing some cellophane, silicone water sealant, and some cardboard to help keep shape I started my vessel.

I started by creating the vessel upside down. Putting the pieces that would be the rim on first and then building towards the base. each piece being put on after meticulous planning, waiting out the drying process then starting again.

My biggest worry was not having enough glass and making the bigger pieces fit onto the mold without issue. since most of the pieces I had belonged to wildly different bottles of various shapes and sizes trying to figure out a pattern that worked was nerve wracking.

Luckily enough I had enough material to make an interesting little art installation in my own home that just so happens to bounce. But it holds water just fine so I can't complain too much.

I didn't have anything that was broken on hand since I usually throw everything that is broken to the trash but I needed to do something for this project. I spent roughly an hour trying to find something that I may have missed but nothing came up. I did however find this pocket watch.

I was not at all attached to it so I decided to break it to try and repair it. Like a caveman, I struck the pocket watch with some scissors, slowly cracking and chipping away at the glass. Eventually it gave in and I was left with the first image.

That was the easy part, now I had to figure out how to stitch it back up. I tried many different things like felt and fabric but nothing really felt right. Then I slowly came to the realization that I broke a perfectly god pocket watch for nothing. In a way, I felt bad. It had done nothing to deserve this. Then my inspiration struck.

I decided it would be rather funny and fitting to then make it seem like the pocket watch has in a fight and is now recovering in a hospital somewhere. It gave life and story to a rather uninteresting hunk of metal and gears. It isn't as glamorous as some other projects m sure, but I am content nonetheless

I had an old pair of glasses that were missing an arm, and the lenses were severely scratched. Using copper wire and a pair of pliers, I carefully bent and shaped the wire into an abstract form resembling a glasses arm. During my process, I was struggling to find a way to secure the arm onto the glasses, and I decided to pop out the lenses and wrap the wire around the frame. In doing so, I broke off a part of the glasses, which I reattached by wrapping the wire around it. In this piece, I used form and shape to creatively mend the glasses. I also contrasted the black glasses with the shiny copper wire.

Where I got the idea from is my mom! She paints and scopes things on cups. I always see her painting on cups so I decided to try it out myself. Now finishing the it, I feel very proud that I tried something new.

The markers gave it a a rough textures and made everything pop out.

It may not be broken but it was about to be thrown out. Anything can be made into beautiful.

When collecting the pieces of the broken mug, I had no sketch or plan of what to make out of it, so I pretty much winged its design by connecting the pieces together and around. My first draft was more open with an open-spaced ceiling, but that left out a lot of pieces. So I tried piecing the larger pieces together upside down and it looked like a cave. I added the other pieces to give it a more refined silhouette of a shrine and added some unused thread I had lying around from my quilt set. One of the artworks that inspired me was Mending with gold, to seal the broken vases with gold, but since I didn’t have anything to seal it with, I instead rearranged the pieces to stand on each other and use the smaller pieces for support. To give it that look of debris and stacked on rubble.

It was a struggle when trying to reimagine a mug into something else with so little, but I think I managed with what I could find and felt sorry for (I have many unused supplies, but my mom tosses them away). Regardless, it was super fun to make this and am really proud of it.