Israeli ceramics
[4] In addition, a tradition existed of producing pots made of clay mixed with straw or gravel for cooking and other utilitarian uses by the local population.
Pottery of this type, which was produced in the Samaria area and in Ramallah, for example, was typically decorated with color made from rusted iron that originated in the Jordan Valley.
The workshop that Ohannessian founded in Jerusalem followed the tradition of ceramic making as he had practiced and overseen it in his atelier in Kütahya, in Ottoman Anatolia, which had flourished prior to World War I and his deportation to the Syria.
Upon the founding of his workshop on the Via Dolorosa, he cooperated with Near East Relief, to train a number of Armenian orphans of the genocide, giving them the skills to engage in the art on a professional basis.
Eisenberg, who was a student at Bezalel from 1913 to 1919, after his graduation went to study in Vienna, at the School for Arts and Crafts, where he took a continuing education course in ceramic design and production.
With regard to ideas, "Bezalel tiles" expressed a tendency toward transcendentalism, seen in their borders cast with images taken from Jewish tradition and Zionist content.
As opposed to the figures from the Jewish world created by the artists of the "Bezalel" school, Samuel's imaged lacked the religious dimension.
[19] In contrast to the pottery of Samuel and Ahronson, the works of Hedwig Grossman displayed an attempt to formulate a Land of Israel "localness" in their ceramic design.
The shape of her pottery was influenced by European Modernism in its lack of decoration and in its organic tendency toward the use of the glossy surface slips of Terra sigillata or ceramic glazes.
Aharon Kahana - who with his wife founded "Beit Hayotzer" [Artisan's Workshop] (Haifa), which was so large he employed three assistant potters—succeeded in defining a widespread style that combined modernist abstraction with decorative folk motifs.
[30] An example of a large scale technological–artistic project is the covering of the entrance to Asia House (1977-1979) in tiles produced in the porcelain molds next to "Naaman" and designed by the artist Pinchas Eshet.
[32] Along with Hedwig Grossman, who taught most young ceramicists in her Jerusalem studio and in Ein Hod, and from 1964 in Givatayim, Hanna Harag Zunz also taught them in the Oranim Seminar (today Oranim Academic College), Paula Ahronson at Wizo in Tel Aviv, and Gedula Ogen at Havat HaNoar HaTzioni (Israel Goldstein Youth Village).
In this chapter, which was accompanied by a number of photographs, Cheney surveyed such areas of art as design, jewelry making, and ceramics, which he juxtaposed to media such as drawing, sculpture, and architecture.
On 24 September 1970, an exhibition opened in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art that surveyed the field of ceramics in Israel and was the ultimate expression of this trend.
"[43] In 1957, in close proximity to one another, Itche Mambush and his wife Aviva Margalit opened pottery workshops in Ein Hod Artists Village.
[44] Some of the artists worked the materials themselves, while others produced detailed sketches for items to be implemented in different workshops, such as the ones in Ein Hod or the one in Kfar Menachem.
[48] Their works included a pioneering Zionist element that expressed an attempt to connect the young Israeli state with its historical and biblical past.
Artists such as Neta Avraham, Shelly Harari, Nora and Naomi, Jean Meir, Maud Friedland, and others, deviated from the tradition of "sculpting with the potter's wheel" in order to try out different techniques, particularly freestanding sculpture.
For example, in her works such as "Puppet Theater" [52] or "Class Photo 1939" (1965), the artist aimed to express psychological and social themes, something that was unusual in Israeli ceramics of the time.
In this Ofrat reflected the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, who emphasized earth and object (and the pitcher as a characteristic expression of this) as an intersection between life and death.
[61] Siona Shimshi, for example, developed her ceramic sculpture as a series of archetypal human forms made of bare material.
Other artists, such as David Morris and Mark Yudell, used images specifically in order to create a private mythological world, which reflected their personal experiences, along with a dollop of humor and irony.
[64] Marie Balian, for example, an Armenian artist, from the 1970s geared her art towards monumental wall paintings made of glazed tiles.
Abraham and Pnina Gofer [he], for example, in the 1970s and 1980s displayed Seder plates made using casting molds, with images done in the ethnographic style, decorated with colorful glazes.
Rayah Redlich, for example, created large scale pots, which she presented as a renewed esthetic and cultural examination, and on which she used techniques of printing and painting "on the shards."
[69] And Daniel Davis used his potter's wheel to create large scale pots whose "shards" were then joined in bundles by steel strips.
In the installation "Anarzik" (1997), for example, the group created, on the structure of a potter's wheel, a complex pot that underwent a transformation of its technology and its form before the eyes of the public.
[72] Artists such as Talia Tokatly, Hadass Rosenberg Nir, Shlomit Bauman, Yael Atzmony, Maya Muchawsky Parnas, and others created installations that combined different media, such as sculpture, ceramics, video, etc.
An opposing philosophy to this sculptural trend was the return to the pottery tradition of which one expression was the increasing adoption of porcelain as the material used on potter's wheels and in casting beginning in the 1990s.
She emphasized the materiality of the pots and jugs she produced in the early 2000s by using slotting and chinking on their surface, by combining the porcelain with "paper clay,"[75] Egyptian paste, and shavings, and by using intense colors.
