Mike Thain

I am broken. Perhaps not as shattered as my siblings, but broken nonetheless. My parents fractured me into a thousand jagged shards during my youth, leaving me to spend my entire adulthood navigating the painstaking process of reconstruction. ​But here is the truth about repair: like a lamp, a plate, or a coffee cup, you are never truly the same once the adhesive dries. There are visible glue lines, jagged chips, and those tiny, essential splinters that vanished into the floorboards, leaving permanent gaps in the silhouette. You carry the anatomy of your own wreckage.

​This history is the heartbeat of my art. It explains why my first instinct with a new—or even a perfectly functional—object is to dismantle it. I cannot leave "whole" things alone. I break them into their raw component parts, only to reassemble them into new, often more frightening, configurations. I strip away the expected to find the visceral. ​I have come to believe that there is a distinct, haunting power in the reassembled. A vessel that has survived its own destruction possesses a narrative that a pristine object can never claim. In my studio, the cracks aren't failures; they are the architecture of resilience. I find that some things—and perhaps some people—become significantly stronger and more beautiful only after they have been broken and forced to find a new way to hold themselves together. ​

Would you like me to adjust the tone to be more poetic, or perhaps sharpen the focus on the description of your art pieces?