Breaking to Mend

In Ciane Xavier’s solo exhibition Breaking to Mend, love is the porcelain. In its fragility, this delicate material is strengthened by stories that are glazed by the human emotions and the relationships that bind one to another. Amassing the walls are handmade plates adorned with the artist’s signature sentimental pop surrealist characters, painted with underglazes in a rhythmic chaos of stories reflecting relationships in their profound joy, inevitable tension, and genuine intimacy. The interplay of both whole and broken porcelains symbolize the various stages of vulnerabilities that each relationship narrates—either still seeing the whole in its brokenness, or too shattered that it identifies as a new entity. This exhibition is an invitation to engage in the metaphorical mending of “moments we cherish and the moments we fear.”