Visible mending

Allowing the work to show

Artwork by @JanRichardsonStudio, 2020

All our lives we learn to hide the scars. Maybe that’s why this image from writer and artist Jan Richardson so arrested me the first time I saw it. I mean, I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t pry my eyes from its dark wash of gray, the piercings in its paper canvas, the uneven but solid stitches of its aging wound.

We al…