Gold in the Cracks

Conrad Calimpong draws a thumb along the gold seam running through his chestnut brown “Pillow Pot Vase” to where it meets three other metallic streaks, fusing a mottled river rock like a jewel or a heart at its center. Like the other pieces in his show Earthquake Trauma: My Path to Recovery in the Anderson Gallery this month, it is a woodfired vessel he rebuilt after it was broken in an earthquake, its breaks limned in gold and a missing shard replaced with stone. 

Calimpong employs what he calls a “cheating” version of the Japanese kintsugi technique for fusing broken ceramics with lacquer and gold dust — using epoxy and covering the tracks of glue with gold leaf, still a painstaking process all its own. 

Most of the material in the exhibition, from the rectangular bins of broken vessels to the individual vases and vertiginous towers of assembled pots and paint cans, were smashed in quakes a year apart, a magnitude 6.2 on Dec. 20, 2021, and a 6.4 on Dec. 20, 2022. It wasn’t the first quake for the 73-year-old artist, nor the first time he’d lost valuable pieces. But the broken vessels represented a lifetime of work, and this time he wasn’t ready to toss it away. “I’d already gone through those other earthquakes and I wasn’t so shocked. And so, I said, ‘OK, I’m gonna pick these up and put some of these back together,’” he recalls. 

At the sushi counter at Rooftop in Old Town, Calimpong pours a measure of sake for the chef, who thanks him with a low nod. In his other hand, Calimpong idly turns his own small ceramic cup, a rough, russet brown. Born at home in Cupertino, California, in 1953, he grew up in the outskirts of Gilroy, picking garlic for 25 cents a hamper alongside his large Filipino American family in the fields during the summer when he wasn’t in school. He also picked prunes, tomatoes and bell peppers, and sometimes hoed weeds on the weekends. In high school, he and a friend got work cleaning out offices and bars, joints with names like Becky’s Burger Pit, some places where they’d sweep a carpet of peanut shells straight out the door.  

One of 10 kids, when Calimpong came back to teach at his old high school after earning his credential, he still had a brother and sister young enough to be in his class. His father Sulpicio had immigrated from the Philippines in the 1920s, working up and down the West Coast, from picking fruit to cleaning fish in an Alaskan cannery, before enlisting in the U.S. Army and serving as a medic in a segregated Filipino regiment. It was when Sulpicio was stationed in the Philippines that he met Pelegia, then only a girl of 15 or 16, whom he married and brought back to the U.S. Pelegia, Calimpong only recently learned, made clay rice pots, bowls and dishes for daily use back then, none of which have survived or he’s ever seen, he says with a slow shrug. 

Calimpong says he hated high school and started taking classes at the local college to speed his departure. There he landed a job cleaning the ceramic studio. “I was 16 and I wanted to be an artist at that point, but I didn’t know anything about ceramics,” he says, but he watched students working on the wheel and was fascinated. He dropped out of high school, got a job in the ceramics lab, started to learn through a “kind of work study program” and married his pregnant girlfriend, with whom he had a daughter. 

The marriage didn’t last but ceramics had a hold on Calimpong for life. “I loved it,” he says, smiling at his younger self discovering ceramics. “I got so into it that I would leave a window unlocked … and I would sneak into the studio on weekends. I got to become friends with the night guards,” he says with a laugh. He became “infatuated” with the prunus or meiping vase form, with its narrow base, full body and small opening. He struggled with the shape, throwing vases as tall as 2 feet on the wheel before finding out they were supposed to be made in sections and assembled, difficult as they were, especially in porcelain. But he says the challenge pushed him, and it’s a form he returns to decades later. 

Calimpong went on to earn his undergraduate art degree in ceramics and teaching credential at the University of California at Davis and his MA at San Francisco State University. At Davis, he says, “There were a bunch of really good ceramic artists in the program at that time,” Debra Butterfield, her husband Robert Hudson and Robert Arnison among them. One mended piece in the show at the Morris Graves Museum, a salt-fired jar, was made back then under Arnison’s tutelage. 

He took up a broom again, sweeping and making clay for free at Norstad Pottery in Sausalito until he landed a spot for $5 per hour making tableware and other functional forms at the wheel. Eventually he moved up to bathroom sinks, an education in useful forms that he supplemented by selling his own pieces at flea markets on weekends. 

By then, he’d remarried and had a 3-year-old son. Calimpong and his wife Donna were looking to move to a safer neighborhood when, on a fishing trip on the Lower Eel River, she decided to head into Ferndale, catch a play and talk to a realtor. The couple bought a tear-down property and more or less put up their new home from scratch, using creek water on the property until they could install plumbing. The couple are no longer together, but Calimpong will have been on the property for 40 years this fall. 

His studio and woodfire kiln, which resembles a stone hut, are on the property, too. Woodfire can be a tricky method, but its devotees are unshakeable. “When I first started, if you got 50 percent of your work come out of the kiln, that was good,” says Calimpong. “Some of them got refired and some of them got trashed. … You don’t have full control. You’ve got to give yourself up to the kiln and the process.” Depending on who’s firing the kiln, he explains, conditions can change, altering the appearance of the pieces. The same is true of how the items are placed inside, determining how the flame passes through the kiln, creating markings on the clay. Maintaining the kiln’s fire controls the atmosphere, how much oxygen is in it, thereby affecting the color. Even variables like the moisture in the wood and the ground make a difference. And you can’t peek inside. After decades of experience, he says, “A lot of it is by feel.” 

“There’s no way that you can be anal about it at all,” Calimpong says, eyes crinkling. “It’s kind of cool to know that you don’t [have complete control] and things are going to happen that you didn’t know. … The glaze comes out and it drips a certain way or in a pattern you didn’t expect.”

When the April of 1992 magnitude 7.2 earthquake shook foundations in Ferndale, knocking many of Calimpong’s collected pieces, some from other artists, from his studio shelves, cascading onto a cart below and crashing into the work on the floor surrounding it, he was devastated. He says he was too disappointed in the moment to consider what potential those fragments held. So he backed a truck up to the studio door and swept the rubble onto its bed to haul the lot to the dump. “I wish I had saved a few of those pieces and put them together like this time,” he says. “In hindsight. It’s easy to say now.”

Ceramic artist Kenkichi Tamimoto, one of Japan’s artists designated Living National Treasures, was a mentor to Herbert Sanders, one of Calimpong’s mentors, and kintsugi had always held some fascination. For Calimpong, it’s not only the aesthetic or the skill, but the symbolism of technique.

“We all in our own personal lives have episodes that are traumatic,” he says. “We look at ourselves as being broken and we have to pick ourselves up and put ourselves back together again … to stand up and face that takes work.” He chuckles, looking into his sake cup. “A lot of us face that challenge.” 

When the 2021 and 2022 quakes rocked his studio, Calimpong began cleaning up the mess with an eye toward rebuilding. He started with one piece, looking for its kin and separating out other shards, gathering chunks and slivers from other pots in piles as he went. When he felt ready, he’d start gluing one together. 

Some had been small as sake cups, others vases the size of a large man’s torso. Most broke and settled nearby, but others flew far across the room and ricocheted. He stored larger pieces together and put the rest in bins and buckets. Eventually, he spread those smaller bits out to hunt for missing sections. If none were to be found, he swapped in rocks, coral and chips from other broken items. 

He identified them by shape, subtle patterns and colors, but also by feel. “Some of these pots I was pretty intimate with from handling them, from having them sitting around. You take them out of the kiln and examine the glaze,” he says. It’s a good thing he likes puzzles. 

“When I first started, I tried to put too many pieces together and the piece would start to deform,” says Calimpong, adding that once the industrial epoxy set, it was impossible to alter. Working smaller and slower, he found, was the solution, and some pieces took a month. A sake cup took two weeks to glue. Adding the gold leaf to adorn the cracks took its own time. 

Sorting through work he’d created as far back as 50 years ago, Calimpong became a kind of archaeologist of his own life and art, reliving old memories. He says he also discovered the insides of pieces he never saw before. “You get to see some things you would never have seen, that was hidden from you. In a closed neck form, the whole thing was hidden from you. And now that it’s broken you get to see the whole thing inside,” he says. “It’s nice to see some of the stuff that you didn’t know. You could only guess. You didn’t know what it would look like.”

The loose bins of broken pieces in the gallery are a good place to examine those interiors, as well as to get a sense of the initial devastation (as do the photos of the disaster in the studio on the walls) and the process of mending and re-creation. “I thought it needed to be there because it brought home what it was to deal with all those pieces … to take these fragments and make it whole again. … When you see the pieces all put back together, you don’t realize how shattered some of those pieces were.” 

At the opening of the show during Arts Alive, Calimpong couldn’t resist the unfinished puzzle remaining in the bins. “I stood there at the shards and started putting pieces back together and said, ‘Oh I could put this one back together.’” 

Kintsugi, whether applied traditionally or patching disparate forms and materials from across years, has a transformative power. “I really liked [‘Journey Home’] before it was broken but it’s much nicer now,” says Calimpong. “It’s no longer a broken piece. It’s whole again.” It was well received in a show in Sacramento, but he thinks the gold changes the viewer’s response. “Now that the cracks have been healed, wow, that’s a nice piece.” It’s like the feeling of seeing someone who’s come through something and emerged stronger and more beautiful for it, rather than someone simply flawless but untested. 

These days, Calimpong says he wakes up and lies in bed thinking about making practical planters and more mei ping vases, perhaps carved with figures, then firing them all at home. 

What he thinks of less and less is their fragility. “The detachment is something you just have to work through,” he says. “And you get older and I see I’m at the far end of my life cycle. I’m still attached to things. You have to work at detachment.” 

Recently at a big family reunion, he gave away pieces that have been “sitting around” his home and studio. “It was nice to have somewhere to go,” he says, and many of the pots and bowls and cups are functional, to be used in daily life, destined to be chipped, maybe dropped by a soapy hand. 

“I don’t feel that anymore, after it’s been broken and fixed, it’s like, ‘OK.’ There’s no more anxiety about it getting broken. I like it just as much as before it was broken.”

Breaking and repairing have given the pieces, and Calimpong, something perfection can’t. “It’s improving ourselves. We face the challenge,” he says. “We put ourselves back together. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but you came through it. You’re scarred but you came through it. You’re still good.”

Conrad Calimpong’s Earthquake Trauma: My Path to Recovery is on view at the Morris Graves Museum of Art at 636 F St., Eureka, through Oct. 25. 

Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.

This article appears in Gold in the Cracks.