Glen Martin Taylor is a former carpenter turned ceramic artist. Taylor combines the processes of destruction and creation in the creative act – he turns broken ceramics into frightening symbols of human resilience.

All of Glen’s work is a cry about the fragility of the soul on the one hand and the incredible ability to heal itself on the other. Imagine delicately decorated with gold ceramics, stitched with barbed wire, reinforced with chains and bristling with nails.

Each work of the artist confronts the viewer with the harsh reality of the scars that life leaves behind, transformed into harsh, provocative beauty. Taylor’s works destroy the perfect facade of success, exposing the jagged edges of the soul.

Glen based his work on the Japanese art of ceramic repair “kintsugi”. Using lacquer mixed with precious metals: gold, silver or platinum, Japanese craftsmen carefully restore broken vases, cups and plates. In Glen Martin’s works, noble gold is replaced by something disgusting: rusting metal, nails, old scissors, barbed wire or blackened solder alloy. In this way, the artist emphasizes that the real process of healing trauma is rarely beautiful.

Many armchair experts have already rushed to write in the comments that the artist has mental problems. Unfortunately, this time they were right. Here is how Glen describes it:

“I had a very difficult childhood. My mother suffered from mental illness. My father was a very fundamental religious man, very angry. There was a lot of grief in his life. Life was hard, emotional. A lot of my work still comes from that place. I don’t know if we will ever heal that sacred wound inside us. When you are a little boy and your parents don’t give you love or don’t hug you, and you feel pain, that sacred wound doesn’t just disappear.”

Glen Martin Taylor.

“My work started out as therapy. I had to learn to accept, even love, the scars that life had left on my soul. My work is a way of shouting that I survived and that I am still here. When others respond to my work, it completes a healing circle within me, realizing that I am not alone, but that I am going through a very common and human process.” Glen Martin Taylor. “It’s not easy, but I have learned to access this flow of deep emotion when I work. My emotions have always been part of my inner life, but now I pour them out into my work. And when I began to do that, I felt like I was finally becoming the artist and person I was meant to be all along.”