Before Me in This World, 2016

Installation, Wheel thrown, stoneware, glazes, synthetic fibers

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Chernichovsky’s precarious stacks of blue-and-white cups, teapots, and plates rise upward while appearing to collapse into one another, held together by a solidified, volcanic ash-like material. Their seemingly accidental arrangement evokes ceramic artefacts recovered from a shipwreck, deliberately blurring distinctions between periods and cultures.

 

The project began during her studies at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and examines her place within ceramic traditions extending between East and West, as well as within contemporary Israeli and Middle Eastern material culture.

 

The works reference the Arabesque series produced by Israel’s Lapid factory in the mid-1960s. Once a significant contributor to local ceramic design, the factory closed in 1990 after struggling to compete with imported goods. By recreating its mass-produced vessels by hand and transforming them into sculptural fossils, Chernichovsky reflects on the tension between local cultural production and processes of erosion and disappearance. The works preserve a material trace of the desire to establish a distinctly local ceramic language.