Kintsugi Cartoon Veteran — Veterans’ Home Garden, York

The Trust asked for a figure that would not be a monument. The man it commemorates spent four years in a wheelchair at the home and another eleven as the person who met everybody at the door, and a plinth with a name on it was the last thing anybody there wanted.

The finish, and why it is the whole brief

The figure is finished as kintsugi: a deep matte charcoal ground broken into irregular plates by fracture lines, with every crack filled by a raised seam of gold. It is a Japanese repair technique, and it works on the premise that the break is part of the history of the object rather than something to be hidden. It was the family’s idea. The fractures do not follow the body’s anatomy; they run across it, through the shoulder and through the knee, because that is how damage actually arrives.

Building a fracture honestly

There are 41 fracture lines. Each one is a real 3 mm groove cut into the shell along a path traced from a photograph of cracked terracotta, then filled slightly proud with gold laid over a red bole. Because the seams are raised they catch light at every angle, and the piece reads as repaired from fifty metres, which is the distance that matters on the approach path.

The pose

Standing, hands in pockets, head slightly turned: the way somebody stands when they have stopped being in a hurry. The uniform is reduced to its silhouette, the beret and the jump smock and the boots, with no insignia, no medals and no rank, because the family asked for none and because the piece is not about the rank.

In the garden

It stands at 1.9 m where the home’s two paths meet, so that it is passed rather than visited. Residents touch the gold seams on the way by, and a few have started to do it deliberately. What the home says about it is in the panel above.