‘Concrete’ is a vase that explores the relationship between fragility and mass; between a material and its cultural context; between the broken and the whole.
Widely used as a strong and resistant medium, mainly in the construction of buildings, concrete - as our choice of material - breaks with the conventional expectation of a material to be used in the crafts. It is closely linked with Brutalism and Beton-Brut, which put forth the aesthetic values of roughness, rawness and straightforwardness. While nowadays contemporary and environmentally friendly techniques are employed across the western world, concrete is still the main building material in Israel and in the Middle East, and thus becomes a dominant part of urban identity. Moreover, concrete has a strong political baggage, being used as means of forced control over populations.
‘Concrete’ explores what happens when concrete clashes with the scale of an object of craft, as opposed to a building: Qualities such as fragility and instability arise and the relationship between the mould and the moulded is being questioned.
The vase is designed so that it thins out towards its edge. Even though all the vases are formed by the same mould each vase unfolds its unique shape, as the act of extracting the object from the mould inevitably breaks its thin edge. The seriality of the casted objects is thus - quite literally - fractured.
The broken edge stands in contrast to the fundamentals of object making, where the edge is required to be clear and perfect in order to define a shape. This notion is clearly apparent in the broad sphere of vessels: a vessel's edge cannot tolerate flaws. Confronting this perception, ‘Concrete’ sets before us a quintessential question: What is a whole object, and can the whole contain the imperfect at all?

Signature: Signed on bottom