Sicilian Vase c. 1878

Frederick S. Shirley made this Sicilian Vase, though we don’t know exactly when, from glass. It looks like it’s been shattered and pieced back together, doesn’t it? This evokes the Japanese art of Kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold, understanding breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Consider the history of Sicily, with its layered cultural influences from the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Normans. It's a place of constant reinvention, each culture leaving its mark, piecing together a unique identity, in a sense similar to the vase. The vase transforms an act of destruction into an act of creation. It reflects the beauty of imperfection and the passage of time, and becomes a potent metaphor for the construction of identity itself.