Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with a lacquer dusted with precious metals, such as gold or silver. Rather than hiding the joins, Kintsugi highlights them and makes the pottery more valuable by virtue of the fact it has been broken. As a practice, Kintsugi teaches us that repair is part of our history. In this exhibition, you see portraits of people who have visible scar tissue from either accidents or surgery. That scar tissue has been overlaid in gold leaf.

The Kintsugi People project was devised by Dr Carol Holliday, psychotherapist, and lecturer at the University of Cambridge (now retired) and produced in collaboration with photographer Ryan Davies and the Arts team at Cambridge University Hospitals. Through her 30 years of clinical practice, Carol found that people often used metaphors of brokenness, fragmentation, splits or cracks to express distress or describe traumatic events. Finding a poetic relationship between this language and the art of repair, Carol was inspired to create the Kintsugi People project as a positive representation of how we can heal and learn to embrace our own histories, both inside and out.