MATTER IS A CENTER OF DREAMING

In Collaboration with Gaston Bachelard

Matter is a Centre of Dreaming is a filmed performance piece in which Ester Beck works with 4.5 tons of clay, creating from the massive clay block an abstract vessel sculpture. She works with her whole body and improvised tools to form this piece in a total dynamic engagement with the clay as an equal; eye-to-eye. The video is shown in loop, as she dismantles the finished sculptural vessel and the action starts over. She says, “It is a perpetual, Sisyphean process, through which I express ideas reflecting my years of work in clay, and the thought that what I do extends beyond the creation of another object”. For Ester it is the act itself that carries the real meaning of what one does. The work is projected straight onto a wall, life size, to powerfully impact the spectator and draw them into the action.

Ester also performs in the making of an abstract sculptural piece in situ in her signature expressive and very dynamic ‘action painting’ like way of working. The pieces are formed in one go, like a continuous brushstroke, from beginning to end within a relative short frame of time.

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ESTER BECK is based in Israel. She works in a free-style forming technique that she developed, after years of wheel-work, producing abstract sculptural forms. For pleasure and meditation, she still occasionally throws vessels on the wheel. She is a member of the Israel Ceramics Association, executive board member of the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Centre in Tel-Aviv, and founder-director of the Benyamini Centre Ceramics Library and Archive of the History of Israeli Ceramics. A member of the International Academy of Ceramics, her work is in private and public collections in Israel, Australia, Korea, Ireland, Israel, Europe and the US.

esterbeckceramics.com