---
title: "Tom Sachs does not throw away failed bowls. He keeps their scars"
locale: "en"
url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/tom-sachs-keeps-ceramic-failures-en"
markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/tom-sachs-keeps-ceramic-failures-en.md"
category: "creative"
tags: ["Tom Sachs", "ceramics", "repair", "craft", "Satan Ceramics"]
published_at: "2026-08-23T18:03:00.000Z"
author: "Léa Perrin"
translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/tom-sachs-garde-rates-ceramique-fr.md"
---

# Tom Sachs does not throw away failed bowls. He keeps their scars

Cracks, blackened rims, gauze and visible repairs remain in Tom Sachs's ceramics. The defect is not erased; it joins the manufacturing record.

A ceramic bowl that cracks in the kiln usually presents two unattractive options: hide the repair as completely as possible, or declare the piece lost. Tom Sachs repeatedly makes room for a third outcome, **keeping the accident visible enough that it still tells the story of how the object was made**.

At *Furniture*, his spring 2026 exhibition at Salon 94, Designboom photographed bowls and fragments that look as though they survived difficult firings and were rescued just enough to continue. Blackened rims, cracks, uneven surfaces, gauze, tape and exposed joins all remain legible.[4](https://www.designboom.com/design/tom-sachs-ceramic-failures-craft-salon-94-jj-peet-satan-furniture/)

A vague celebration of “the beauty of imperfection” would miss the more systematic part of Sachs's ceramic practice. For over a decade, the bowls have belonged to a routine of repetition, sorting, numbering and use in which a repair can become **another piece of process information**, alongside form and glaze.[2](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/satan-ceramics)[3](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/A-Good-Shelf-2025)

## Useful failure

Sachs began studying ceramics seriously around 2012, including intensive work with JJ PEET. Two years later, PEET, Mary Frey, Pat McCarthy and Sachs exhibited together as *Satan Ceramics*.[2](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/satan-ceramics)

Their ceramic practice was framed as collective work rather than solitary, silent production: Sachs's historical page describes a weekly ritual in which the group met to make, fire and glaze while also eating together, talking and sharing knowledge.[2](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/satan-ceramics)

The 2014 text also stresses integrity of material and sincerity of the object.[2](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/satan-ceramics) In Sachs's own work this connects with a longer habit visible in furniture and sculpture: screws, joints, seams, adhesives and workshop decisions do not necessarily disappear when an object leaves the bench.[1](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/furniture-s94)[4](https://www.designboom.com/design/tom-sachs-ceramic-failures-craft-salon-94-jj-peet-satan-furniture/)

> **Failure changes status**
> - firing or use produces a crack, marked rim or deformation: Break
> - resin, gauze, tape or another visible intervention may hold the piece together: Repair
> - the trace remains instead of being rebuilt into a neutral surface: Keep
> - selected bowls enter a numbered and curated series: Catalogue
> The sources do not establish that every accident is deliberate. They show what can happen to an accident after it exists.

That distinction matters because firing is a material process that generates its own variation; Sachs is not necessarily drawing a crack and then pretending to repair it, while the part he clearly controls afterward is **the decision to keep, repair, select or reject**.

## Visible repair

The Salon 94 photographs make that decision difficult to miss. Designboom describes cracked white forms put back together with gauze, tape and exposed repairs, while another blackened-rim bowl stands on small metal legs.[4](https://www.designboom.com/design/tom-sachs-ceramic-failures-craft-salon-94-jj-peet-satan-furniture/)

> Illustration: Tom Sachs ceramics with cracks and visible repairs. At Salon 94, repair does not always reconstruct a uniform surface. Gauze, tape, joints and material changes remain visually accessible. Credit: [designboom](https://www.designboom.com/design/tom-sachs-ceramic-failures-craft-salon-94-jj-peet-satan-furniture/).

The gesture matches the furniture around it. Salon 94 presents Sachs in *Furniture* as a bricoleur who works from available material and leaves evidence of problem-solving visible in the object.[1](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/furniture-s94) Designboom draws the same connection between repaired ceramics and plywood Shop Chairs whose fasteners and construction remain exposed.[4](https://www.designboom.com/design/tom-sachs-ceramic-failures-craft-salon-94-jj-peet-satan-furniture/)

**By contrast** with a repair hidden beneath a seamless finish, a clean but visible repair speaks the same language as an accessible screw and an undisguised panel edge. **In exchange for** visual continuity, the object keeps a legible record of where the workshop intervened.

It also changes the way time sits inside the object, because a perfect surface compresses earlier stages into one final state whereas a visible repair restores **a before and an after**: first a form, then an accident, then a decision to continue.

## Number everything

The idea becomes clearer in *A Good Shelf*, a 2025 exhibition built around roughly thirty Sachs ceramics.[3](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/A-Good-Shelf-2025) The gallery explains that he makes chawans regularly but most never leave the studio. From them he selects a small number of “heroes,” chosen for what he regards as a kind of perfection within handmade imperfection.[3](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/A-Good-Shelf-2025)

A hero may earn its place through the balance between lip and foot, the position of a NASA logo or, very specifically, **a well-executed resin crack repair**.[3](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/A-Good-Shelf-2025)

The bowls are also stamped, serial numbered and catalogued within a practice concerned with serialisation, repetition and progression,[3](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/A-Good-Shelf-2025) and the ceramics begin to resemble a workshop log in which each object occupies one position inside a long sequence of attempts.

> Illustration: Group of ceramics displayed during Furniture at Salon 94. Repetition makes the display read like an archive of variation. The objects share neither a perfect surface nor an identical form, but they belong to the same practice of making, sorting and display. Credit: [designboom](https://www.designboom.com/design/tom-sachs-ceramic-failures-craft-salon-94-jj-peet-satan-furniture/).

This prevents a common misunderstanding about handmade work: irregularity does not deserve celebration merely because it exists, and Sachs's own method depends on making many objects, comparing them and deciding which irregularities deserve a place in the public series.[3](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/A-Good-Shelf-2025)

## Same grammar

The return of Satan Ceramics to Salon 94 in May 2026 gives this logic a wider field. Mary Frey, JJ PEET, Pat McCarthy, Luc Hammond-Thomas and Sachs brought their ceramic practices together again while *Furniture* occupied the building.[1](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/furniture-s94)[4](https://www.designboom.com/design/tom-sachs-ceramic-failures-craft-salon-94-jj-peet-satan-furniture/)

JJ PEET's work in particular prevents the show from collapsing into one “Tom Sachs look.” Designboom describes chopped textures, painted cavities and forms that move between vessel, tool, ruin and prop.[4](https://www.designboom.com/design/tom-sachs-ceramic-failures-craft-salon-94-jj-peet-satan-furniture/) The common ground is not that each artist manufactures the same kind of accident; it is that clay is allowed to retain pressure, use and evidence of the hand.

This also keeps failure from becoming romantic. A structural defect in an object meant to hold liquid is still a functional problem. A piece may be too damaged for use or survive only as sculpture. Exhibition sources publish no reject rate, mechanical testing or rule specifying how much damage moves a bowl from repair to discard.

> **Known / missing**
> - weekly making, firing and glazing ritual in Satan Ceramics: Documented
> - selection, serial numbers, catalogue and hero bowls: Documented
> - cracks, blackened rims, gauze, tape and visible repair in 2026: Observed
> - reject rate, mechanical tests and precise discard criteria: Not published
> This is a method of selection and repair, not a recipe for making every break acceptable.

## Keep evidence

The reusable idea reaches far beyond ceramics.

A workshop can erase every correction until production appears to have encountered no difficulty, while another workshop may keep selected traces when they do not prevent the object from working: repair plugs, welds, reinforcements, seams, replaced components, annotations and material changes. **The cost of** the second choice is a less uniform surface; its benefit is a more readable manufacturing history.

The second approach does not excuse poor workmanship. It requires the maker to distinguish **dangerous failure, repairable failure and informative trace**. Sachs's selection of “heroes” demonstrates precisely that an imperfection gains no value simply by existing.[3](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/A-Good-Shelf-2025)

A repaired bowl becomes interesting because it remains readable: we can see what the material did, where human intervention took control again and why the object was judged worth continuing.

Industrial finish often works by erasing manufacturing history, whereas these ceramics move in the opposite direction by showing the result together with **evidence that the result nearly failed to happen**.

## References

1. [Tom Sachs, Furniture — Salon 94, 2026](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/furniture-s94)
2. [Tom Sachs, Satan Ceramics, 2014](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/satan-ceramics)
3. [Tom Sachs, A Good Shelf, 2025](https://www.tomsachs.com/exhibitions/A-Good-Shelf-2025)
4. [Designboom, Tom Sachs turns ceramic failures into a language of craft throughout Salon 94](https://www.designboom.com/design/tom-sachs-ceramic-failures-craft-salon-94-jj-peet-satan-furniture/)