Artist: Jake Hamade
Creative collaborator: Shanlee Potts
I do not speak upon the behalf of women or aim to silence them in favour of my own voice; I’m hoping to use my own white male privilege to send out a message – particularly to white men whom wouldn’t listen to those who fall out of the category of cis white males.
The Golden Beauty
For this piece, I decided to look into pottery- a medium which I have never done before. While making the piece, I went through several different mediums including clay, oil paint, and digital sculpting, before settling on one of my most comfortable mediums; digital artwork. As for the piece itself, I wanted to focus on a technique known as Kintsugi.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with a golden binding agent, alongside a philosophy about understanding that the piece is just as beautiful after being broken as it was before. Though humans aren’t pottery, we are able to break and shatter due to events in our lives – whether past and present. The piece focuses on this idea displaying a body repaired with kintsugi, however I made it important to not include any limbs – showing that physical disabilities are not a barter on one’s worth and beauty as an individual. To top this off, I refused to include a face – a nameless and anonymous identity that could be anybody. Essentially, the meaning of this piece is about destroying ableist stigma, and allowing a new mindset to appear where equality is reached – an aim of feminism.
As for the title, lots of times, people with disabilities are stigmatized to the point where peers see them as a walking manifestation of their ability – that they become their disability. The title challenges this. Yes, it brings focus to ‘gold’ – the fact that major disabilities are often part of one’s identity, but understands that whatever disabilities someone has does not have any negative weight on their individual beauty.
