1171 - Unbroken by Katya Roberts

Hi, This is Katya Roberts. I’m the artist who created Unbroken.

What would you say to your future self now? “Hold on, it will get better, the best is yet to come, this will bend you but it will not break you?”
Unbroken has spoken into my own life, years after I created it. I’ve faced serious difficulties with health and family and even war when my country of birth was invaded in Feb of 2022. I’ve thought back to “Unbroken” to remember strength and resilience. It was like I created it as a letter to my future self, and to others, though that wasn’t my original intent.

I think it is a wonderful gift to get to create out of the broken places. Artists often mend personal and collective wounds through their work.

It’s a privilege to give form to thoughts and ideas that connect us as humans.
It is a gift to the artist and the viewer alike, to make something out of nothing.

A thought, an idea materializes.

Life breathed into the material.

Ann Hamilton once told me that I respond to materiality. I think I am in awe of it. It is such a miracle to even exist, to take shape, form and space as a human, as a living work of art.

So all of my art concerns itself with themes that connect us and hopefully help us to remember who we are. Who we really are, in the vastness of time, in this place in the history of this planet. In the act of creation artists meet themselves. In the act of viewing art we meet ourselves and those we share this time and space with.

It's easy to forget what a gift it is to simply notice. As an artist you practice noticing,
and then you put a lens on it. You say “there, look, something is happening here.”

This moment
You get to hold it (for yourself and ultimately for others).

And you pull it into the here and now, commemorate it, memorialize it, explore it, negate it, find it again. It’s like a child playing with a toy.

And like for a child, it is also all somehow magical. There are parts of creation that are inexplicable.

It’s a privilege and a humbling experience to be an artist.

Unbroken in the form that it has taken was born out of play, out of the ordinary, out of manipulating a piece of cardboard into shape. My kids, then toddlers, came over and tried to help me causing me to approach it differently. And suddenly there was a moment of noticing that told me something is happening here with this form. Later, I copied the creation onto a piece of cardstock, manipulated it, and then unfolded it and
laid it flat on my studio table. I saw its wholeness was preserved. This wholeness struck
me and the standing, stable shape captivated me. I liked that it could hold multiple
forms with its cuts and bends.

Something of child’s play was in it too. A bit like an airplane made of paper, a bit like experimental origami. But it was decidedly doing something. It had a sort of life, so I leaned it to see what it would tell me about itself, about me.

Humans are incredibly resilient and adaptable. A number of different cultures have
similar proverbs and haikus. “A tree that bends, does not break” is the Tanzanian
iteration. Wherever you are in the world, some storms will come, that you will deal with
either personally or collectively. And the sculpture is a reminder of just that, no matter
what comes your way, you may bend, there may be new scars, but you will stand -
Unbroken.