Today I learned about Yobitsugi. It is the counterpart to the more famous Kintsugi technique, in which cracks are filled with gold. But in Kintsugi, the pieces are all from the same bowl: they are put back together, and the gold marks the lines of the break. Yobitsugi begins where Kintsugi ends: when a fragment has been lost. It’s gone, and it won’t return.

So the potter doesn’t make a fake replacement: he looks for a shard from another piece of pottery, a color that doesn’t quite match, a pattern that clashes, and grafts it right in, leaving it visible.

The result is bowls made up of two stories.