Ceramist and sculptor Glen Martin Taylor addresses themes of impermanence, transformation, and the tension between damage and repair.

Transmission 221: Interview with Glen Martin Taylor

Glen Martin Taylor is a contemporary ceramic artist and sculptor whose work frequently combines broken ceramics with human-centered themes. His often surreal compositions juxtapose classical beauty with contemporary fracture. Formerly a carpenter, he incorporates destruction into the creative process, intentionally breaking hand-made pottery and fine china in a cathartic act, then repairing them using his own interpretation of kintsugi, the Japanese artform of mending ceramics with precious metals. In his work, however, rusted metal, nails, scissors, barbed wire, or blackened soldering alloy often replace the traditional gold, shifting the aesthetic from precious to raw.

Taylor’s practice is rooted in emotional depth. While his inner life has always been shaped by strong emotions, he has learned to channel them directly into his artwork. Vulnerability became essential to his process as he felt the urgency to be raw and honest, both with himself and his creative path. His pieces underscore the stark contrast of existence—how life can be simultaneously beautiful, sad, and horrifying. Many of his works emerge from personal therapy, shaped by a need to embrace—and even love—the scars left on his psyche. He frequently breaks and reassembles delicate porcelain items, figurines, vases, and ornamental elements to create eerie, lyrical forms. His art embraces imperfection and the narrative potential of damaged objects, addressing temporality, resilience, and vulnerability.

Exhibited in galleries and collections across the United States and abroad, Glen Martin Taylor’s work questions conventional ideas of beauty and wholeness. Through the fragile and deliberate act of repair, he reveals how the private process of healing trauma is rarely neat or attractive—but remains essential.

Glen Martin Taylor’s official site | Facebook | Instagram | Snap Collective

Which moments, personal, historical, or artistic, have most profoundly influenced your practice and your passion for art at your beginning? 

As a child, playing in the mud after a rainstorm.

What has been the most unexpected challenge you’ve faced so far, and what did you take away from the experience?  

I’ve had so many challenges, like everyone else, and I learned to work through them, creating, trusting my heart.

The use of broken ceramics is central to your work. What first drew you to this unconventional medium, and what aspects of brokenness connect with the themes you investigate? Your artwork often juxtaposes beauty with destruction and fragilities. What draws you to this tension between wholeness and fracture? 

I had read about Kintsugi and in a non verbal emotional moment of my own brokenness, I saw the work I needed to do. Art is about tension, growing as a human you learn to accept fragility.

His ceramic artworks address trauma, breakage, and the search for new wholeness through healing.

What is your emotional process like when intentionally breaking a ceramic piece? Can you share with us how your pieces come to life? I saw that you painted watercolors  of your sculpture. Which one comes first? Do you sketch or conceptualize your works beforehand, or is your process more intuitive and responsive to the materials?

My process is varied and non verbal and without rules or structure, just emotion and heart.

How do you choose the elements in your art pieces, are these elements incorporated, found or repurposed, and what role do these components play in your narrative? Do you see the history or previous life of the broken ceramics as an integral part of the narrative within your artwork? If so, how do you engage with that history?

Many of the elements in my work relate to memories, and so in working with those I find therapy and healing.

There’s a delicate balance between destruction and creation in your artwork. Do you consider your ceramics to be a form of protest, meditation, or reconciliation, or all three?

My work is autobiographical, personal. 

Many of your works reflect contemporary anxieties, climate change, war, identity. How do you balance subtlety and directness in conveying these messages?

I don’t worry about balance, I just work, and feel and know.

What do you hope remains unbroken in people that interpret your artwork, despite the inevitable cracks? Uncertainty and doubt are part of the experience you want to create?

I just hope my work connects with other human beings once in a while, so we all understand that we are not alone. Embracing uncertainty is part of growing older.

How do you see your role as an artist in today’s polarized social and political climate? How do you feel about the increasing digital mediation of art? What gives you hope right now, artistically or personally? 

This moment calls for humans to connect, heart to heart. I have learned that hope is the seed of the future, of just existing without surrender.

Photos courtesy of Glen Martin Taylor

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.