Tables Turned – Rachel Menashe Dor

Curator: Efrat Eyal

Opening: Thursday 16/7/20 from 19:30

Closing: Saturday 29/08/20 at 14:00

Gallery Talk: Friday, 21/8/20, first session at 10:00, second session 11:00, third session 12:00, fourth session 13:00 For registration

 

Long term knowledge and experience with clay creates a bodily experience that is stamped in the body, in the same way as the body is stamped in the clay.

In the group of works shown in the exhibition, Rachel Menashe Dor conveys her deep connection with clay and nature, and the complex beauty of “body wisdom” that is learned and matures with time.   The videos that were created especially for the exhibition, focus the observer on the interaction and the mutual influence between the body that creates and the material. Menashe Dor selects intimate situations that are familiar to her from her working process in the studio and disrupts the normal working pattern to rethink the process.  Through these metaphorical body actions and the dialog she creates with the clay, she relates her living experience as a woman in the world and expresses different parts of her personality.

In the work “Head Bowl” Rachel uses a traditional African work method to make vessels and turns her head into the mold. Her image is reflected in the mirror as she forms the clay on her head and so the clay takes on the different forms.  One can think of these forms as echoing male and female qualities as she experiences them.  In “Agna”, the joint video with the movement artist Tal Dayan, the pelvis is the center of bodily gravity and the main spirituality of the woman. It contains memories of the initial experience of life and the connection to it.  “Upside Down: is an expression of the effort in juggling daily life and the tension between the material and the spiritual.

The series of works “Self Portrait” made of stalks of oats and formed into vessels by wrapping them around in a “contained complex” expresses the artists feeling of her attempt to grasp all the parts of her living experience.  There is no clear boundary between internal and external as it extends and is formed from the bottom up.

In the exhibition the ceramic material is not present and it appears that by changing the medium from clay to video it is an act of distancing, however, it is an act of broadening and extension of the dialog within the ceramic medium and offers a new and fresh view of this ancient field of making. 

Just as the potter creates a hole in the center of the hump of clay and gradually expands it into a vessel, so does Menashe Dor expand her personal making practice and invites us to enter and fill the process with personal meaning and connections.