Ran Out by Shlomit Bauman at Periscope Design and Neo-Craft Gallery, Tel Aviv (June 2013) was a meditation upon the extinction of natural resources–and so much more. The project brought together local Israeli clay (called S5), a relatively “common” clay that has been all but depleted in Israel and abroad, and porcelain, ceramics’ most exalted material. Bauman refers to the combination of the two materials as a “binding of opposites” but this is only one of the dichotomies that she mashes up. In his essay,“Azal…Lock, Stock, and Barrel–on Shlomit Bauman’s exhibition,” David Goss expounds upon Bauman’s intricately layered work:
For other works in the series, Bauman recycled original porcelain that she obtained from the Naaman ceramic factory and utilizes historical molds she obtained from the Israeli Lapid ceramic factory that closed due to globalization processes of the late 1980’s, and combines them with traditional Palestinian pots from Hebron, another local victim of the same economic process.
In this way she transforms her works into political hybrids of Israeli-Palestinian nationalities, clashing ideologies and religions, territorial conflicts, and land-earth-clay that has been taken and claimed from one another. And what is deemed an attempt for a metaphorical solution—S5 clay and porcelain, high and low materials, industrial and traditional ceramic processes—is infused into new ceramic objects. In a number of these works, the actual material work process becomes a political metaphor, causing the work to literally self-detonate. The clash of different materials creates an inherent technical incompatibility; the simultaneous firing of two ceramic materials that react in disparate ways to different oven temperatures creates a ceramic explosion of sorts. The works cannot contain themselves—they are distorted and twisted—and become dysfunctional from their own creative process.
Shlomit Bauman is an Israeli designer who sees the ceramic design field as a “cultural research lab.” Bauman is a Lecturer of Ceramic Design in the Industrial Design Department of the Holon Institute of Technology in Holon, Israel.
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Above image: Work from Shlomit Bauman’s Ran Out at the Periscope Design and Neo-Craft Gallery, Tel Aviv in June of 2013. Image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Ilam Amihai.
Shlomit Bauman’s exhibition Ran Out at the Periscope Design and Neo-Craft Gallery, Tel Aviv (June 2013). All images courtesy of the artist. Photographs by Ilam Amihai.
Read David Goss’ entire essay here
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