As strange as it sounds, there is often beauty in broken things though it requires a certain way of looking at them. Broken objects made with care can remain beautiful even when they are imperfect. An example familiar to me is the chawan, or traditional Japanese tea bowl. If it is good one, which is to say, one made with care, it remains beautiful even if it is cracked or chipped. I have an old tea bowl in my collection which is precisely in that condition, and I do not love it any less because of that.
In this post, I like to focus not on objects but derelict landscapes such as natural wastelands, including once lived-in towns which have long been abandoned, places where man-made structures have rusted, pieces lie around like ruins and wild grasses crawl all over them like colonizers. They are not places most people would consider beautiful. But Hilary Bird Mayo would disagree.
Mayo is a London-based potter. She makes sculptural ceramics inspired by decaying landscapes. Their textures of her works echo rusted, eroded, lichen covered structures, crumbling concrete and bricks. They have that rough, weathered look that contrast with the dainty perfection of porcelain.
Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast in the UK is one such place that has inspired May’s works. Once a secret military base used for experiments and bomb testing, it is now an abandoned place of wildness, littered with decaying concrete and rusting corrugated iron buildings overrun by wild grasses.
How can a place like this be beautiful? Yet, like her, I find a certain beauty in this surreal landscape which she has captured in stark monochrome photographs. For Mayo, beauty is found in the juxtaposition of abandoned structures built by man and nature’s remarkable ability to colonize those structures. It is a beauty that resonates with the Japanese aesthetic known as wabi sabi, which roughly means an appreciation of beauty in the rustic, the imperfect and the impermanent, the kind of bitter-sweet beauty that resides in the natural cycle of growth, decay, and renewal.
Orford Ness by Hilary Bird Mayo
