Summer, while being tiresome and exhausting, also brings a touch of excitement – for kids, students and teachers it comes in the form of school holidays, and for art and design buffs in the form of graduate exhibitions at the Bezalel and Shenkar art and design academies, Israel. Every year I come to both events and usually get so excited I nearly start bouncing off walls like a sparrow with caffeine overdose. I enjoy all departments’ presentations, but seeing that I am a jewelry designer and researcher in the field, jewelry graduation projects are of a special interest to me. This year I managed to talk to some of the jewelry graduates about their works and as a result present you with a small selection of projects that drew my attention the most (it’s a good thing I’ve been given a word limit for this article, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to make a selection at all).
Graduation project of Daniel Kanarik from Shenkar starts with an irrigation system turned into a garment. A video, displayed on the wall, shows a woman moving around while dressed in a structure of intertwined elastic black tubes, occasionally sprinkling water that, being accentuated with orange backlight, creates an initial impression of dancing flames. This piece was the first item shown in Kanarik’s collection. The rest of the body pieces that followed while repeating the aesthetic of the irrigation system that includes intricate black tubing, metal connection points, does not actually conduct water – but maybe they don’t have to. Kanarik creates a dystopian speculative design, where extreme conditions force people to adapt their bodies to everpresent heat and absence of water, perhaps similar to the situations existing in some parts of the world today. Wearable shapes that he assembles from the tubes bring to mind cases of body disfigurement or evolutionary modifications in appearances, but ephemeral, imagined, penciled-in – like if instead of creating a camel god would just draw a hump over a horse with a pen. The design here joins forces with fashion sense Iris Van Herpen-style, creating a kind of performance Shenkar jewelry department is known for.
While Daniel Kanarik builds structures going far outside the body, Bezalel graduate Naama Ben Porat goes layers and layers deep into exploring the nature of the little everyday things and our relationships with them. Naama’s subject is tools – simple things, like comb or fork or hammer or knitting needle. For her they symbolize evolution, trans-humanistic in a way, the one that is happening outside of human body. Her way of exploration is looking from the close, tracing and feeling every line and every fold. Ben Porat creates a series of small wearable objects combining clay, enamel and latex, whose goal is to be a tangible form of memory – sentimental memory, muscle memory, a memory so determined on preserving its object that it renders it almost unrecognizable. Ben Porat is basing her project on objects that hold personal value for her – such as her childhood fork. With them, she goes through multiple design stages: the initial mold, the wax casting, warm wax manipulation in order to deform the shape, second molding, casting in clay, firing in a kiln, breaking (!) the result and lovingly healing it kintsugi-style with enamel, then dipping it in latex.. In that way functional tools are disabled, they are being stripped of any remaining function, becoming ghosts of themselves, recreated in organic colors (bone-white clay, skin-like latex) to feel more like an extension of our bodies rather than industrial products. Ben Porat’s objects look more like archeologist’s findings, and just like archeologists we try to guess what these things used to be in the past; and only when taking them by the handle (and sometimes the handle is the only thing that is left) we instantly remember.
Carmel Shahar, Born From Bone, 2024, Photo credit: Orit Bertini Shavit
Carmel Shahar, Born From Bone, 2024, Photo credit: Orit Bertini Shavit
Shenkar’s graduate Carmel Shahar’s work is also reminiscent of archeology, in terms of color palette and theme; however instead of looking from the outside in like Ben Porat, Carmel Shahar takes an opposite approach. Through a complex process that combines analogue techniques (like manually crafting from cardboard and metal) and digital ones (recreating these shapes in 3D-modeling software) she makes a series of oversized wearables that look like human bones. In general, as people, we shouldn’t be able to see the bones in the body, and if we do it usually means that something went very wrong. But Shahar’s artificial bones fit perfectly as puzzle pieces, as if they were not made to form a structure that holds every human upright, but to decorate them from the outside. In addition, while bones are inherently intimate, Shahar insists that they are also universal, and as such their likeness can be used as building blocks to create sculptural shapes that combine baroque abundance with futuristic asceticism.
While Carmel Shahar gets her inspiration from bones, Bezalel graduate Tomi Hagai gets hers from fossils – not directly but through dreams. Her series of porcelain necklaces titled “Arid – Heavenly” is an exploration of Hagai’s own dreams that are in turn influenced by the reality of her growing up in the desert south region of Beer Sheva city, Israel. Hagai’s necklaces are a meeting point between night visions, desert landscapes and meticulous manual craft. Each link of her complex and fragile wearable structures is sculpted by hand, wearing the marks not just of artist’s fingers, but of fossilized findings she got from the desert: Hagai purposefully leaves little imprints of shells, rocks and insects on raw porcelain before firing in order to give tangible impressions to something conceived in a dream.
Light monochrome palettes of Ben Porat, Shahar and Hagai are meant to underline the natural state of being, something organic or inherent to humans. Orianna Bohbot, graduate of Shenkar, also uses white in her works, but with a different purpose. For her it’s a blank page, starting point, anonymity, perfection, the beginning of the conversation. Bohbot doesn’t create bracelets or necklaces, she works with the entire body, and sometimes one body is not even enough; one of her pieces is created to be worn by two people intertwined together by shared burden. The common denominator for her series is a white sphere that differs in size from piece to piece. This sphere creates tension in every work, for the viewer as well as for the wearer, whose entire personal and interpersonal space is redefined by the conceptual garments. Bohbot explains that her work talks about balance, dependency and unity – but I think it also takes the viewer into more intergalactic territories; not just because of futuristic aesthetic of early Luc Besson films, but because the tension that the artist creates with the contrast of spheres and thin lines evokes a sense of some cosmic laws unfolding before us – black holes, wormholes, gravitational singularity.
Bezalel graduate Noa Dershowitz’s project brings us back from singularity to reality – in her piece the jewelry joins forces with industrial design in order to create a symbolic yet functional artifact – a disposable set for conducting Havdalah ceremony in field conditions – for travelers, soldiers, hikers etc. Dershowitz conducted an extensive research to find out what traditions jewish people that find themselves far away from home miss the most and what can be done for them in a most efficient way. As a result she built a unique set that can be worn on a chest pocket like a medal, that contains ritual amount of wine, spices, a special flat candle with four wicks and a prayer – all these items are used in a ceremony separating Sabbath from the rest of the week.
There are some stereotypes we have a habit to believe in – men are from Mars, women are from Venus, Frenchmen are stylish and Englishmen are polite, Shenkar students are extroverts building enormous colorful constructions and Bezalel students are introverts, digging deep inside their souls to create the smallest piece of symbolic object. Sometimes I am tempted to make the same generalization, but this year I find that there are more similarities between graduation projects of the two schools than there are differences. Predilection toward the monochrome, visual language full of air and freedom, tendency to look inside oneself to find answers about the world, and to look in the past to be able to see the future – all this form a certain unified world view that, if we could name it we would probably call it “Fossils and Future”.
Katia Rabey, Shenkar graduate of 2017, jewelry designer, artist, researcher and columnist (writing about jewelry for Art Jewelry Forum, Klimt02 and Fashion Theory). Member of The Association for Contemporary Metalsmithing and Jewelry in Israel
