Archaeological pots tell the story not only of an ancient culture, but also the traces of the person who created them. For Sivan Scheffner, a vessel is also an encounter with an age-old ceramic tradition and a material world born out of conditions and possibilities very different from those of today.
Through the physical marks left in the clay vessel, she identifies a deep familiarity with the material, the knowledge and choices embedded within it, and, through these, the individual who crafted it. The tension between Scheffner’s closeness to the potter’s wheel and the historical and cultural distance serves as the starting point for the exhibition Tell. The exhibition seeks to view the craft of pottery as a sequence of material and cultural layers built atop one another over generations.
This perspective stems from Scheffner’s work as both a potter and a restorer of archaeological ceramics. Her restoration work takes place within the very same material landscape where the vessels she references were originally made, buried, and unearthed. Her daily engagement with pottery enables her to read within these artifacts not just archaeological data, but the remnants of the creative act—material decisions, working gestures, and the direct connection between the hand and the clay.
Scheffner engages in a dialogue with “vessel types”—an archaeological term for classifying pottery by shared characteristics—and with storage containers familiar from local archaeology: the pilgrim flask (tzephat), the cooking pot/cauldron (kedera), and the juglet (pakhit). She adopts their proportions, production methods, and the material knowledge embedded within them. Her intervention focuses on the handles—the precise point of connection between the potter’s hand and the user’s hand. In these pieces, the handles extend beyond their original dimensions, winding around the body of the vessel or flaring outward as if out of control. Without altering the vessel type itself, Scheffner stretches the function of the handle beyond its utilitarian purpose. Through this intervention, she examines what might be revealed when pulling a handle (a technique in pottery where a strip of moist clay is drawn out from a mass of clay by wet hands to form a handle) is liberated from its practical purpose.
This inquiry continues in a series of works based on isolating the pulling action itself. For Scheffner, the act of pulling does not cease once the handle is complete; the pulled handles remain attached to the raw lumps of clay from which they were drawn, as if the motion continues long after it was meant to end. The material continues to stretch and pile under the pull of gravity. A gesture that is usually absorbed into the finished object is exposed here, becoming the primary subject of the work.
The ropes used to bind the works are also crafted entirely by hand. Scheffner collected young date palm leaves, a material native to the very environment where these vessel forms originally evolved—and braids the ropes herself, expanding the tapestry of crafts to which the exhibition refers. Serving as carrying ropes, they join the handles as physical actions linking the hand, the vessel, and the body.
The pilgrim flask, the cooking pot, and the juglet were created in a world where a vessel’s shape was dictated by its function —to carry water, store, cook, or serve. Scheffner revisits these foundational gestures from a different material and cultural reality, one in which the vessel is no longer bound to its original utility. Just as in a tel (an archaeological mound where layers of civilizations build upon one another), Scheffner’s practice rests upon accumulated layers of knowledge, gestures, and technologies passed down through clay over thousands of years. From within this continuum, she stretches the potter’s actions beyond their original boundaries, testing what new possibilities open up when craft is freed from necessity. In this exhibition, archaeology serves not as an end goal for research or reconstruction, but as raw material for rethinking the craft of pottery—its boundaries, and the possibilities it continues to offer today.
Sivan Scheffner lives and workes in Giv’atayim, Israel. She holds a Master’s degree from the Department of Material Culture Heritage at the School of Archaeology and Maritime Civilizations, University of Haifa (2023–2025); a Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Ceramic and Glass Design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (2013–2017); and was a recipient of a “First Studio” residency scholarship of the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Center (2017).
She has exhibited in group exhibitions at museums and cultural institutions across Israel, including Teo – Culture, Art and Content, Herzliya (2025); The Tel Aviv Art and Design Biennale at the Eretz Israel Museum (2020, 2023); and the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Center, Tel Aviv (2021, 2024).
The small gallery
Curators: Reut Rabuah, Shelly Shavit
Opening: Thursday, 6.8.2026, 11:00
Gallery talk: Friday, 28.8.2026, 11:30
Closing: Saturday, 19.9.2026, 14:00
