PERFECTION:A QUESTION OF REPAIR

Last Saturday, after a beautiful holiday with friends, we hopped in the car and drove an hour deeper into the mountains to Penland School of Craft to catch the last day of PERFECTION: a question of repair, curated by Penland gallery curator Kathryn Gremley and guest curator Celia Pym. Our timing was ideal — our good friend and featured artist in the show, Rachel Meginnes, lives nearby and was able to meet with us to catch up and walk us through the show.

The show struck me in many ways, particularly the simple celebration of the beauty of mending and imperfection—an embrace of choosing to move slowly, deliberately, and with interest.

In Jessamyn Hatcher’s essay on the exhibition, SOMETHING CAN BE DONE HERE, she quotes Celia Pym —

“I don’t think you can mend unless you have the tools to mend. I don’t literally mean a needle and scissors. The tools are an encounter, or an experience, or an understanding, a knowledge.” She says, “You can’t talk about mending without talking about damage. My own experience with mending is that finding the particular types of damage that I am attracted to is half the work. Noticing what the damage is [and saying] ‘I can do something with that. Yeah, something can be done here.’”

Something can be done here. Inside each of us, here in Western North Carolina as we recover from Hurricane Helene, right there in the place where you live, and when you find a connection. We are all mending in our own way.

Though the show closed this past weekend, you can still learn about the artists and read the exhibition essay by visiting Penland’s site.