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Zemer Peled at the Sherrie Gallerie
Artwork involving infinite patience

by Christine Hayes
January/February 2020 Issue

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“From a distance, the sculptures look soft,” says Peled. “But up close, you realize they’ve got bite.”

Zemer Peled was born and raised in Israel. She grew up on a kibbutz. When she finished her Israeli army service, she was at loose ends at age twenty. Fortunately for all of us she went into art therapy, and gravitated toward clay as a medium. “Clay is an amazing material,” Peled says. “I feel more alive. I love the way my body reacts to the pieces.”

In numerous online videos, we can watch Peled in the process. She calls her method of working a “dance,” and it is. Some of her pieces are enormous. They give one a vision of a giant sea anemone in an Alice-like adventure underwater. Some of the pieces are small, a blossom-like creation, or a sea cucumber.

Many of the pieces appear as forests of black, white, or color-striped shards attached to an underlying core of red or black; some have no visible core. Each piece gives one the thought, “How can a person do this in one lifetime?” Peled says she takes about four months to complete one of her larger works.

© Artwork by Zemer Peled

She has a kiln named “Superman.” The finished large piece goes into it. Peled has a voluminous collection of bins of porcelain pieces, all ready to go into the core clay base, or a clay-and-concrete-covered framework. She works from the top down, covering the lower levels with plastic as she “dances” her way down. In the repetition of the placement of the shards comes movement, form, texture, and shadows. She works organically and lets the piece evolve, rather than making preparatory sketches. She works so closely to the base that when she steps back, the effect is different than what she ever visualized.

Her work lends itself to the stop-action, speeded-up version of creation, or in one case, destruction. In the video “Destruction,” a bristly black tornado floor-to-ceiling piece is in a stark white room with a ladder, and the black-clad Zemer Peled goes at it with some emotion at first, then more structured dismantling piece-by piece until the shards and the two formerly joined bases are all on the floor. Wow! The film is completely silent except for natural breaking sounds.

She does say, in one interview, that she once helped her mother take down a wall in their home, and that felt good. Her two things she keeps on hand: a hammer, and band-aids.

The shards are made this way: some smaller ones are formed by putting porcelain clay into a slicer. These are more curly. For the straight “French-fry” ones, or the small paddle-like protrusions, she flattens wet clay into large thin sheets with a slab roller. These are stained and cut, or are cut, fired, glazed, refired, and sorted in bins. She will fashion smaller like-shaped pieces with a hammer. Some are glazed before they go into the base, some are glazed after. The glazing accents the movement inherent in the sculpture.

In a video entitled “Nomad” filmed at the Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City in 2016, Peled says she has been working this way since about 2013. (There are videos of her painting floral tableware using a spinning wheel, which I assume are from an earlier period.) In three years a collection of the clay creations come together as a group. Peled says, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time… to be able to see the whole group of them as a family.” She stresses that they are not to be thought of as creatures or copies of nature: “I want them to be themselves.”

Another video from the Cynthia Corbett Gallery “Young Masters Art Prize” (2017), uses music, water sounds, and clay-breaking noises, and shows a small sculpture being unloaded from a small kiln, the hands of the artist on the piece with stunning touch.

Peled has a master’s from the Royal College of Art (UK) and has had her pieces at Saatchi Gallery in London and at Sotheby’s. Her work is collected by the Fuller Craft Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. She has been featured in Vogue, O Magazine, and Elle.

Sherrie Riley Hawk of the Sherrie Gallerie first heard of Zemer Peled through Patrick Doust and Richard North, two nationally known ceramic collectors. She took their advice last summer and made a trip to Baltimore to solidify a relationship with the artist and her art.

Peled had just made a major move from Los Angeles to Baltimore, occupying a large, inexpensive studio space in a renovated, re-purposed industrial park. The massive kilns Peled employs in her work need that kind of space, as well as access to large amounts of electricity!

Hawk was able to observe Peled’s process so that she in turn is able to appreciate and explain it to others. “I am always looking for process-based work, work that is labor-intensive, with perfection in the details. In other words, it just blows one’s mind. The artist gets into a meditative state and says, ‘just do it.’”

In the fall of 2018, Hawk featured a contemporary art show at her gallery with three artists who worked in this manner, one of them was Peled. The other two were Christian Faur and Yong Joo Kim. Christian Faur was represented with his work of stacked hand-cast encaustic crayons, the colored tips arranged to form an image. Each piece takes an amazing amount of these crayons, and of course, infinite patience in placing them. Yong Joo Kim has her Velcro jewelry in the Sherrie Gallerie; her work in this three-person show was Velcro stacked into compositions, also taking great concentration and patience. “This kind of show gives me an opportunity to get work from each artist, and get them in the company that they want.”

Zemer Peled had five or six works in that show. Hawk reports, “All of her pieces were sold before the show opened. So she was willing to come again.”

Peled is understandably concerned that her works are expertly crated and shipped. In preparing this article, Hawk told me she was considering driving personally to Baltimore to oversee the transport of the art. “I can do it, but I hate taking two days away from the gallery,” she said. Usually one sends a truck and some professional art movers.

Hawk continued, “I really feel lucky, this is what I most desire… This is what I strive for, to bring the best work to Columbus.”

The artist, Zemer Peled, will be in the Sherrie Gallerie for the opening on Sunday, January 19, 2020, from 2 to 4 p.m. The show runs through March 8. The Sherrie Gallerie is located at 694 N. High St. and is open Tuesday through Saturday 11 to 6, Sunday 1 to 4. The phone is 614-221- 8580. Visit www.sherriegallery.com and Facebook. Visit www.zemerpeled.com

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