mending...

walking in kyoto to get some tea from my favorite tea shop i passed a beautiful old store front. the shop was closed, but i wanted to get a picture of one of the windows when i noticed the dashed lines on the small hanging sign over the doorway. a closer look revealed an ingenius and beautiful mending of the cloth, with white fabric sewn onto the back to fill in the areas where the white front of the logo had torn open.

for some wonderful unknown reason the fixer decided to use white thread instead of blue... thus visually mapping the shapes of the white fabric scraps that should've been discreet and invisible from the public side of the sign. along with the sympathetic relationship of dashed lines to my own work (as measured units related to the translation of text into images), i was just kind of in awe of the simple human approach to the repair and the beautiful new drawing that it made...