Dabrowski’s
Mixed-media sculpture | 22″ × 19″ × 11″ | BKMV Annual Art Exhibition, 2015

“The breakdown of personality is also its beginning.” - Kazimierz Dąbrowski

Dabrowski’s began the day I found a pile of shattered windshield glass scattered across the roadside - the remains of an accident from a few days earlier. The glass was still catching light in small, trembling flashes. I remember thinking: if these broken pieces could speak about the human condition, what would their story be? What would it feel like to be scattered, stepped over, ignored, and yet still holding the memory of something once whole?

Those fragments became the core of the sculpture. Around them, I built a tangled wire structure - part shelter, part trap - the kind of inner landscape we enter during moments when nothing feels stable. The materials are raw: driftwood, scrap metal, broken glass that refuses to become smooth again. There is no attempt to fix them. Only to witness what they already are.

From the center rises a small white figure, carrying a single shard. It moves upward on a fragile incline, not towards victory, but towards some uncertain possibility. What does it carry - pain, memory, or simply the weight of becoming? And how do we keep moving when we are made of pieces?

The work echoes the ideas of Kazimierz Dąbrowski, the Polish psychologist who believed that certain forms of inner collapse - what he called “positive disintegration” - can become the starting point for deeper growth. Years ago, I discovered an article from the Davidson Institute titled “Dabrowski’s Theory and Existential Depression in Gifted Children and Adults.” Reading it at the time genuinely changed something in me. It helped me understand that confusion, fragmentation, and intensity were not signs of failure, but signs of transformation. In a very real way, that article helped me survive myself.

This sculpture is not an illustration of theory. It is a response to it - a way of asking: When we break, what new shape quietly begins? What remains inside the fragments we carry? And how do we become ourselves again, piece by piece?