|
|
|
|
|
|
Artist Exhibitions:
BOOK HERE FOR ART WORKSHOP
Art Workshop
Dates : 13,14 February 2012
Venue: Edgware Studio
81
Edgwarebury Lane HA8 8LZ
Monday 13th Feb - 2.30 to 4.30
SCULPTING WITH PAPER CLAY
Developing ideas and carrying
them through to completion
Tues 14th Feb -2.30 to 4.30
STILL LIFE...
Further Information
|
|
Artist Galleries:
Galeria Gaudi Madrid
heirloom Studio London
Etz Chaim Gallery Pinner
london ...
Further Information
|
|
Artist Reviews:
Coming Soon!
|
|
Collections:
Many Synangoues in London San
diego South Africa, Holland
Singapore Etc
SEE www.judaic-artworld.comfor
full listing
Constitutional Court
Johannesburg South Africa
Two ceramic panels hang in the
entrance to the court
one depicts the judges on the
bench in Stoneware and
porcelain
the second depicts the
Traditional African ...
Further Information
|
|
Commissions:
www.CHUPPAH WORLD WIDE.com has
to date,provided
159 bridal couples with a
chuppah for their
nuptials-2005
Commissions for a designer
chuppah come from all over the
world and include;
Immanuele College London
Jewish Museum, Faro
Stanmore Synagogue LONDON
Newbury Park Synagogue Essex
UK
Raleigh Street Museum, Port
...
Further Information
|
|
|
Artist Statement for Carole Smollan-Rudick
|
|
|
Testimony and Memory: the textile art of Carole Smollan
Dr.Jennifer Harris.Whitworth Museum
Masnchester
Carole Smollan describes her large collection of miniature Torah mantles as a ‘collective memory’, a weaving together (to use a textile metaphor) of her life’s artistic work and personal history. The idea for them – the ‘canvas’ on which she now works almost exclusively – came from the discovery of a small travel Torah that she encountered on a highly emotive trip to Lithuania in 2001 to create a mural for the Tolerance Centre in Vilnius. After her commission was complete, she took a trip through the shtetls to find her great grandfathers house in Zagare.
Often with beautifully stitched and embellished covers (mantles), the miniature Torah, she learned, was carried by travellers in old Jewish communities in case they were unable to get home for Shabbat. The discovery intrigued and inspired Smollan to create her own, contemporary versions of these traditional objects of Judaica.
The Torah mantle ‘dresses’ and protects the Torah, traditionally a handwritten scroll comprising the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Old Testament, which contain all the laws and instructions for Jewish ritual. A portion of the Torah is read out each week in synagogue and it takes a year to complete the readings. The Torah thus symbolises the law of God and the Torah mantle is the holiest of synagogue textiles. The beauty of the fabrics and the textile skills lavished on the Torah mantle are a measure of the regard in which the Torah is held.
Smollan’s Torah mantles exhibit the extraordinary range of decorative variation to which cloth lends itself. They are exquisitely worked, occasionally whimsical, and always rich in meaning. She employs a wide range of decorative stitching techniques and other sorts of embellishment such as applied fragments of old and found lace, a thread which links this newest body of work to her early career in lace and lingerie design. The silks and silk velvets that form the ground fabrics of the majority of the Torah mantles reinforce the association of ritual textiles with the most precious fabrics. Most are also fragments of experimentation going back many years with pattern dyeing techniques.
Smollan has a particular affinity with shibori, the Japanese term for methods of dyeing cloth with a pattern by binding, stitching, folding, twisting, or compressing it. She has also developed her own individual technique of ‘bleeding’ silk. These pattern-dyeing techniques epitomize the way in which cloth retains the memory of any action that is performed on it and is the essence of the visual statement that textiles have made over the centuries.
The techniques contribute to, and enhance, the iconography in telling the stories of the Torah mantles. Additional resonance and semiotic potential is generated by the fact that all of the textile fragments and trimmings used to construct the mantles formed part of the artist’s treasured store of off-cuts and rejected portions of other textile projects, most notably the 159 chuppot or wedding canopies that she has made and decorated during her career as a textile artist and designer. This practice also recalls a new-from-old tradition that is found within early Judaic needlework for the synagogue, when fragments of valuable textiles from other objects, or even from personal treasures such as bridal dresses, might be incorporated into new ritual textiles. When you emigrate, as Smollan did from South Africa to London in the 1990s, you inevitably leave behind large parts of your own history. Having previously worked mainly on commissions, for Smollan the Torah mantles represent an intensely personal project, the materials unlocking a myriad of memories.
Carole Smollan was born and brought up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. She cannot remember a time when textiles were not part of her life; her relationship with the touch, smell and colour of cloth began when she was a small child on the floor of her tailor grandfather’s cutting room. In her twenties she was the head designer for a leading South African lingerie company before taking up ceramics. For many years she had her own studio in Johannesburg, where she produced large abstract and narrative clay murals. Arriving in London without a kiln, she returned to that primal relationship with cloth and began to make and decorate chuppot, which will themselves be preserved as family heirlooms and passed on through the generations.
A small, very moving series within the collection of miniature Torah mantles tells the story of Smollan’s own family exodus from Lithuania to South Africa; these objects are artificially aged and stained and incorporate fragments of family
travel documents and wedding ketuba (the Jewish marriage agreement), heat transfer-printed photographs and other family memorabilia. The series also bears silent witness to those family members who did not make the exodus and later perished in the Holocaust.
Other imagery on the Torah mantles is more traditional – the Tree of Life, the menorah (seven-branched lamp), the Ark of the Covenant and, in Hebrew script, prayers and words spoken at life-cycle ceremonies. They communicate a sense of Jewish identity and Jewish experience in the diaspora, evoking ideas of connectedness – another linking of the metaphorical threads. Yet Smollan’s imagery is vital and fresh, a reinterpretation of the ritual iconography.
Carole Smollan’s miniature Torah mantles are also part of a wider movement in the world of contemporary art textiles, for miniature textiles is a growing genre. In addition to their practicality (they do not require serious resources and are relatively easy to transport and exhibit), they represent a fundamental way of interacting with the world; their scale intrigues and invites closer investigation. Just as we discover unexpected qualities on examining something small and found in nature like a beautiful polished stone or a rare butterfly hovering on a leaf, miniature textiles are perfect vehicles for the exploration of exquisite materials and fine hand work.
Ritual textiles are an art of the everyday and the fabrics used to create them an analogue for the degenerative and regenerative processes of life. Carole Smollan’s miniature Torah mantles are ritual textiles for the 21st century. They symbolise connectedness and bind the artist to her forebears and to all within the faith.
Dr Jennifer Harris is Deputy Director and Senior Curator of Textiles at the Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester. The Gallery holds one of the finest collections of world textiles in the UK.
Exhibition Althorp Gallery - London - SEPTEMBER 2008
Exhibition – Yeshiva University Museum-New York
February 2009 through June 2009
E mail: carole.smollan@googlemail.com
|
|
contact artist
