Local? 2018, Shlomit Bauman

“This work is a result of my collaboration with Abed Al Jabari, a potter from Hebron, which has been ongoing for 20 years. Here we combine personal and collective iconographies, at once traditional and contemporary. The work touches upon concerns such as local versus global identity, the ownership of knowledge, its preservation and its cultural contexts. Additionally, it raises questions about the possibility and essence of a collaboration within a reality shaped by a geopolitical conflict, as well as by the perspectives of a contemporary ceramic artist and a traditional potter, and the possibility of forging a connection between them. Can opposites connect?

In order to create a series of works concerned with locality, and in accordance with the approach that local materials are charged with local meanings, since 2010 I’ve been working with a ceramic material originating in the northern-central area of the Negev Desert (composed of S5 clay). The fact that this local material has become depleted due to over-quarrying and use in industries such as the rubber and pharmaceutical industries, marks, for me, a point of no return – the existence of a changing reality and the depletion of natural, cultural, and personal resources.”