The annual group exhibition of Ceramic & Crafts Assocation of Israel 2024

We all seek balance within chaotic realities, an anchor to hold onto; we yearn to return to our center and find identity, meaning, and peace.

In her influential book, “Centering”, philosopher and ceramicist M.C. Richards described artists, and potters in particular, as: ” We are troubadours after all, a traveling troupe of center-makers, overcoming the fall, perceiving the laws of gravity, leaping but reestablishing justice and equilibrium in the process. There can be no morality and no spirituality without the artist showing us the way.[1]“

From ancient times to the present day, in cultures around the world, the craft of pottery has been likened to creation and healing. In recent decades, the process of centering the material on the wheel has served as a metaphor for a spiritual process, for centering the “self.”

Centering the material requires the potter to center their thoughts, body, and hands. Centering the material is a process: it involves movement and change – the spinning wheel, the hands exerting forces, raising and lowering the material. Hence, the spiritual parallel also includes processes, changes, and the movement of the soul towards centering. We balance ourselves while in motion.

Twenty-five artists have given form to centering: centering as a circle, the “yin and yang” reflected in the contrasts between black and white or light and darkness. Centering as a useful tool or a broken tool. Some of the works deal with longing for centering, others contrast centering and chaos, or between sacred and profane. In one of the works, the tight centering gradually unravels at the edges.

The works selected for the exhibition are mostly made of ceramics, but there are also works made of glass, video, sewing and embroidery threads, interactive light sculpture, ready-made objects, and more. They express the effort to reach centering, in the failures and successes along the way, in the material aspects of centering as well as in its spiritual aspects.

[1] Richards, Mary Caroline. Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person . Wesleyan University Press. Kindle Edition.