Repairing Sidewalks With Gold

Contemporary artist Rachel Sussman works with golden pigment to fill in urban pavements, that gain artistic dimension and allow pedestrians to notice celebrate urban historic value.

The beauty of this project consists in turning something that is usually masked into a beautiful art piece that draws attention to the passing of time and the history of the urban strata. This concept is borrowed from the Japanese Kintsukuroi (“to repair with gold”), the tradition of placing value on the restorative process as an integral part of an object’s history.

Sussman was struck by an image of the traditional Kintsukuroi practice and decided to take the process physically into the streets to create a wider sentiment. To create the pavement installations she used tree sap-based resin and a combination of bronze and gold dust. It is interesting to see what these projects can bring out of physical structures and they tell a wider story about history and healing.

The art piece dimension that mending ‘broken’ streets takes is not only aesthetically novel and eye-catching, but also a reminder of history. To create the pavement installations the artist used tree sap-based resin and a combination of bronze and gold dust.

The cracks in the pavement of yesterday restarting material life cycles today — now that’s our kind of urban renewal.