Through decades of trial and error, the Palestinian artist Vera Tamari has developed a process for making monumental clay relief sculptures, involving collective effort and labour-intensive stages. After preparatory research and drawing and materials testing, the sculptures are cut into smaller pieces that are hardened, smoothed and shrunken in the kiln, then fitted back together.
The process is long and risks ever-present; as a result the sculptures carry an element of solemnity, leaving to ruminations of destruction and dispossession. At the same time the work delights in the lessons of history, the resilience of botanical specimens and the joy of collective craft.
Long based in Ramallah, Tamari is beloved as a teacher, mentor and builder of institutions. Her own practice has challenged, for over forty years, what clay can do and how it relates to other media – including painting, photography, video installation, public sculpture and performance. The hundreds of clay pieces that make up Tale of a Tree (2002) or ceramic seeds rotating in Mantra (2019) are as much about duration as they are about sculpture. Meanwhile, Tamari’s paintings on fabric find her just as conversant in the worlds of gestural abstraction.
—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
