The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
In March 2023 an announcement from the Tel Lachish archaeological site in Israel stated that an ostracon (potsherd used as a writing surface) dating from 498 BCE had been discovered. Written on the clay fragment was the Aramaic inscription “Year
24 of Darius.” Darius I, King of Persia, reigned from 522–486 BCE, and the presence of the shard, implying Darius’ rule in Judea, was a first.
The Israeli Antiquities Association (IAA) did tests and scans and declared the ostracon—assumed to be a receipt for goods received or delivered—to be authentic, and intended to publish the discovery in the IAA journal. However, an “expert”
came forward to say that she was responsible for the writing, having done it as a demonstration for a group of students. She dropped it on the ground after the lesson and subsequently apologized for her error.1
While this story might be embarrassing for some and humorous for others, it is not unusual to find authentic shards in ancient lands like Israel. Zemer Peled, who was raised on a kibbutz in northern Israel, recalls that every summer archaeologists
would set up camp in their midst to recover “messages from the past.”2 As a child, along with her friends, she was exposed to and participated in such digs to unearth the cultures and religions that preceded the current inhabitants
of the land. This experience has a profound influence on her work, although it might not be apparent at first glance.
Essence
Bunch of Shards provides a useful example to highlight the contradictions in Peled’s ceramics as well as explain her process. Seen from afar, it is an open, Delft-blue chrysanthemum, its layered outer petals (called ray flowers in botany)
spiraling clockwise. The interior petals gradate from partially blue to white; the center (disk flowers) is pale green/blue with a bull’s-eye of beads that include a circle of red and black. The assumption might be that Peled derives inspiration
from the fluffiness and delicacy of flora, but this would be only partially true.
Each of the petals is what Peled calls a shard.3 She says, “Shards and archaeology are a crucial part of my work. It’s my core inspiration. People think of it as flowers and natural.”4 And that’s okay because
the floral semblance seduces the viewer. But when she describes how the fragments are made, the image is not one of fragrant bouquets and posies: “I make slabs of porcelain and then cut them and put them in a kiln. I high fire them and then
smash them with a hammer.” Peled’s studio has countless containers filled with handmade shards in various shapes and hues that await incorporation into a sculpture.
Looking at Bunch of Shards from the side, the method of attachment becomes clear. The rigid glazed and unglazed shards—also named “feathers” by Peled—are pressed into soft earthenware or stoneware clay. Then, the entire
piece is fired again. She explains, “Most of the work is producing thousands of pieces. Once I have everything, I can begin. Deciding on the colors I want takes the longest time.” Since she mainly sells work on commission, clients have
to trust her because she doesn’t do drawings or plan ahead. “I have just the color of the pieces and the scale. It’s organic, I go with the flow. Although I stopped dancing at the age of eighteen, I’m still dancing with my
pieces. I never know exactly what shape it’s going to be.”
Peled’s view is that digging to find shards and fragments of pots in archaeological sites around Jerusalem segued into her practice. “Whenever I make my own shards, I feel as if I’m creating my own history. And I’m always thinking
about how my pieces are going to be found and perceived in the future.”
Steps to Ceramics
Zemer Peled’s own history bears on the very existence of her practice. Neither of her parents are artists, but they encouraged their children to find their own voice. Her mother frequently built “stuff” in and around their home on the
kibbutz and Peled took a woodworking class so she could help her mom in her construction projects. Classical music was a strong presence—her brother, Amit Peled, is a renowned cellist—as was dance, yet Peled cannot remember being taken
to a museum or gallery. She assumed she would become a dancer until she got to high school and realized that she didn’t enjoy it anymore.
At the age of nineteen, while dealing with depression, Peled’s parents sent her to a psychologist who employed art therapy in their sessions. “That’s how I started touching clay and I fell in love with it immediately. It is very therapeutic.
Clay saved my life. Coming to the studio is still the best place for me.” She took night classes in ceramics and the impact of art therapy on her well-being initially inspired her to want to study the practice in order to help children. While
Peled’s dyslexia made the prospect of academic studies in psychology daunting, the research into art therapy’s requisites was not wasted: she discovered art school. She created a portfolio and was accepted at Bezalel Academy of Art and
Design in Jerusalem from where she graduated with a BFA in ceramics in 2009. She says, “I found my voice, I found my place in the world. I am grateful that it happened to me at such a young age.”
At Bezalel Academy, Peled specialized in design and sculpture and, after being exposed to wheel throwing and other techniques, decided to use molds. Her final project was a mold of a tractor that was meticulously detailed and had many parts, both of which
qualities she has retained. When she moved on to the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, graduating with an MA in 2012, she abandoned the molds to work directly with clay. “Not having a mold—something between myself, like a plaster mold
or the wheel, and the material—was a big revelation for me.”
For her final project at RCA, Peled did her first large-scale, site-specific installation, I’m Walking in a Forest of Shards. Its placement in a gallery whose windows looked onto a garden of ferns was appropriate—the texture of the
fern trunks matched that of the sculpture. It took three months to make the shards, one week to create the floor-to-ceiling object, and ten minutes to destroy it at the end of the show. This represented a psychological breakthrough in not becoming
attached to the work. Peled has been using the language of shards ever since.
Following on from RCA, Peled did a residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana (2013–15), which she calls her most prolific. Encountering snow and extended freezing temperatures, while beautiful and exhilarating, kept her indoors. It is also
coincidental that this was Peled’s blue period, whereby she was inspired by Japanese blue-and-white ceramics while in an environment whose colors are typically associated with winter. Images from this period (JRA video) show the separate
elements of the pieces—uncolored and colored, glazed and unglazed porcelain; smashing of porcelain; and shards sorted by color and size. Even the dust from hammering is salvaged and incorporated.
Another two-year residency occurred at California State University in Long Beach (2016–17). The residencies, which provided access to a vast array of tools and equipment, permitted the firing of large pieces. Since establishing her studio in Baltimore,
Maryland, Peled’s own kiln has required her adaptation to making sculptures in pieces or working small to form large-scale creations and installations.
During the Long Beach period, Peled was invited to make a sculpture for the luxury resort, JOALI, in the Republic of Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Inspired by global warming and the bleaching of nearby coral reefs, Maldives Vibes is primarily
white with shards of extruded porcelain in orange, pink, salmon, and gold tones. Peled’s work, situated in an exterior pool near the resort’s spa, joins work by artists from South Africa, Venezuela, Turkey, Spain, the US, and South Korea
to offer guests an “immersive art concept.”5
Choreography
An immersive art concept, while part of JOALI’s marketing, also forms a portion of Zemer Peled’s portfolio. The first manifestation of immersive art happened at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks in 2017. Called Suspension,
the work consisted of extruded white porcelain in elongated hook shapes. Starting on a frame near a skylight, Peled began hanging the shapes onto each other, gradually creating a volume of linked clay pieces held together solely by gravity. Light
from above, as well as a large window, gave a cloud-like, ethereal quality to the piece. Peled described Suspension’s month-long existence as being about time and memory. “It’s like music. You have the best performance for
just an hour. And then it’s all in your memory.”6
The highlight of the installation was the collaboration between siblings Zemer and Amit. Seated under Suspension with a 1733 Goffriller cello, once owned by Pablo Casals, Amit played Journey with My Jewishness accompanied on piano. There
was concern that porcelain might fall, hurting Amit, or more critically, the cello, but the concert held no catastrophic moments. Amit said, “I was a bit scared because of this humongous porcelain above my head. But, then I actually really felt
I’d become a part of it. Seriously. I think it changed the direct experience of the concert for the public because the cello and me and the installation became one. The music came through the porcelain shards.”7 In addition
to the cello’s sound, during the four-week installation pieces fell to the floor as the fragile porcelain gave way, creating other sounds.
It might also be said that a final six-week residency at the Bernardaud Porcelain Factory in Limoges, France, in 2019 was immersive for the artist and Bernardaud’s customers. Peled was initially interested in working with the factory’s ready-made
shards– the whole and partial pieces rejected as imperfect. Even though she was fascinated by these, she used unfired trimmings, instead, to create sculptures and then re-fired them. These pieces are ghostly in their whiteness and shadowy negative
spaces. More importantly, however, she was exposed to china-paint overglaze and decals, which are used to decorate tableware in Bernardaud’s inventory. Peled learned the techniques of China painting and made drawings and paintings of flowers.
This technique is desirable because it is quick, and low firing means speedy results. Bernardaud appreciated Peled’s flower designs to the extent that her paintings were made into decals resulting in the In Bloom dinnerware collection.
The lesson here is to embrace every residency with creative ingenuity rather than a set agenda—the results can be better than expectations.
With the establishment of a permanent 1500-square-foot (139.4 m2) studio in a former warehouse, Peled has space to offer further immersive art, with concerts and events being held amongst her raw materials and finished sculpture. I imagine
the acoustics are beneficial because of the high ceiling, concrete floor, and surrounding hard surfaces.
Rondo
Peled had her first child in 2021; she now has two toddlers. “I’m in a place now where I have two babies. I feel like motherhood changed me. Also my work. I’m trying to find a new voice now. I actually started working with textiles.”
When her daughter was born and she was house-bound as a new mother, she bought a sewing machine, took sewing classes, and started making quilts. She draws parallels between ceramics and quilting: “In ceramics, I love the craft and the making—I’m
obsessed with it. So many techniques and things that are passed down through generations. And quilting is similar. [The language is] similar to my work—large-scale creations made of small pieces.” As a gift to herself for her 40th birthday,
Peled took a workshop with renowned American quilter, Nancy Crow, in May 2024.
The quilting represents a shift as a consequence of marriage and motherhood. Prior to this stage of her life, Peled was driven to travel and do residencies as well as build her ceramics career. The shards became representative of her background and a
unique motif in her work. But when asked about the spikiness and unapproachability of her sculpture, Peled admits, “It’s the barrier that I put around my whole life. It’s really interesting what you say; nobody ever told me that.
I rarely put myself out, like a photo. If I do put out a picture of myself, it’s when I’m working.” As mentioned previously, her audience brings more gentle associations to her work. Peled acknowledges this, “Although a lot
of people say it looks very soft, like a textile you want to touch, you then see how sharp and dangerous it is. It’s very hard for me to open up to other people, to show the real self.”
Motherhood and a desire to somehow incorporate textiles with ceramics may change the nature of Zemer Peled’s sculpture. In the meantime, she’s working with terra cotta, a material to which she’s partial. She also wants to go back to
large-scale construction. This is a period of transition for this internationally regarded ceramic artist whose attraction to what remains of the past is looking for new beginnings in her future.
the author D Wood has a PhD in design studies and is an independent craft scholar whose artist profiles and exhibition reviews have appeared in an international roster of art and design publications. She is the editor of and contributor to Craft
is Political (Bloomsbury, 2021).
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
In March 2023 an announcement from the Tel Lachish archaeological site in Israel stated that an ostracon (potsherd used as a writing surface) dating from 498 BCE had been discovered. Written on the clay fragment was the Aramaic inscription “Year 24 of Darius.” Darius I, King of Persia, reigned from 522–486 BCE, and the presence of the shard, implying Darius’ rule in Judea, was a first.
The Israeli Antiquities Association (IAA) did tests and scans and declared the ostracon—assumed to be a receipt for goods received or delivered—to be authentic, and intended to publish the discovery in the IAA journal. However, an “expert” came forward to say that she was responsible for the writing, having done it as a demonstration for a group of students. She dropped it on the ground after the lesson and subsequently apologized for her error.1
While this story might be embarrassing for some and humorous for others, it is not unusual to find authentic shards in ancient lands like Israel. Zemer Peled, who was raised on a kibbutz in northern Israel, recalls that every summer archaeologists would set up camp in their midst to recover “messages from the past.”2 As a child, along with her friends, she was exposed to and participated in such digs to unearth the cultures and religions that preceded the current inhabitants of the land. This experience has a profound influence on her work, although it might not be apparent at first glance.
Essence
Bunch of Shards provides a useful example to highlight the contradictions in Peled’s ceramics as well as explain her process. Seen from afar, it is an open, Delft-blue chrysanthemum, its layered outer petals (called ray flowers in botany) spiraling clockwise. The interior petals gradate from partially blue to white; the center (disk flowers) is pale green/blue with a bull’s-eye of beads that include a circle of red and black. The assumption might be that Peled derives inspiration from the fluffiness and delicacy of flora, but this would be only partially true.
Each of the petals is what Peled calls a shard.3 She says, “Shards and archaeology are a crucial part of my work. It’s my core inspiration. People think of it as flowers and natural.”4 And that’s okay because the floral semblance seduces the viewer. But when she describes how the fragments are made, the image is not one of fragrant bouquets and posies: “I make slabs of porcelain and then cut them and put them in a kiln. I high fire them and then smash them with a hammer.” Peled’s studio has countless containers filled with handmade shards in various shapes and hues that await incorporation into a sculpture.
Looking at Bunch of Shards from the side, the method of attachment becomes clear. The rigid glazed and unglazed shards—also named “feathers” by Peled—are pressed into soft earthenware or stoneware clay. Then, the entire piece is fired again. She explains, “Most of the work is producing thousands of pieces. Once I have everything, I can begin. Deciding on the colors I want takes the longest time.” Since she mainly sells work on commission, clients have to trust her because she doesn’t do drawings or plan ahead. “I have just the color of the pieces and the scale. It’s organic, I go with the flow. Although I stopped dancing at the age of eighteen, I’m still dancing with my pieces. I never know exactly what shape it’s going to be.”
Peled’s view is that digging to find shards and fragments of pots in archaeological sites around Jerusalem segued into her practice. “Whenever I make my own shards, I feel as if I’m creating my own history. And I’m always thinking about how my pieces are going to be found and perceived in the future.”
Steps to Ceramics
Zemer Peled’s own history bears on the very existence of her practice. Neither of her parents are artists, but they encouraged their children to find their own voice. Her mother frequently built “stuff” in and around their home on the kibbutz and Peled took a woodworking class so she could help her mom in her construction projects. Classical music was a strong presence—her brother, Amit Peled, is a renowned cellist—as was dance, yet Peled cannot remember being taken to a museum or gallery. She assumed she would become a dancer until she got to high school and realized that she didn’t enjoy it anymore.
At the age of nineteen, while dealing with depression, Peled’s parents sent her to a psychologist who employed art therapy in their sessions. “That’s how I started touching clay and I fell in love with it immediately. It is very therapeutic. Clay saved my life. Coming to the studio is still the best place for me.” She took night classes in ceramics and the impact of art therapy on her well-being initially inspired her to want to study the practice in order to help children. While Peled’s dyslexia made the prospect of academic studies in psychology daunting, the research into art therapy’s requisites was not wasted: she discovered art school. She created a portfolio and was accepted at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem from where she graduated with a BFA in ceramics in 2009. She says, “I found my voice, I found my place in the world. I am grateful that it happened to me at such a young age.”
At Bezalel Academy, Peled specialized in design and sculpture and, after being exposed to wheel throwing and other techniques, decided to use molds. Her final project was a mold of a tractor that was meticulously detailed and had many parts, both of which qualities she has retained. When she moved on to the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, graduating with an MA in 2012, she abandoned the molds to work directly with clay. “Not having a mold—something between myself, like a plaster mold or the wheel, and the material—was a big revelation for me.”
For her final project at RCA, Peled did her first large-scale, site-specific installation, I’m Walking in a Forest of Shards. Its placement in a gallery whose windows looked onto a garden of ferns was appropriate—the texture of the fern trunks matched that of the sculpture. It took three months to make the shards, one week to create the floor-to-ceiling object, and ten minutes to destroy it at the end of the show. This represented a psychological breakthrough in not becoming attached to the work. Peled has been using the language of shards ever since.
Following on from RCA, Peled did a residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana (2013–15), which she calls her most prolific. Encountering snow and extended freezing temperatures, while beautiful and exhilarating, kept her indoors. It is also coincidental that this was Peled’s blue period, whereby she was inspired by Japanese blue-and-white ceramics while in an environment whose colors are typically associated with winter. Images from this period (JRA video) show the separate elements of the pieces—uncolored and colored, glazed and unglazed porcelain; smashing of porcelain; and shards sorted by color and size. Even the dust from hammering is salvaged and incorporated.
Another two-year residency occurred at California State University in Long Beach (2016–17). The residencies, which provided access to a vast array of tools and equipment, permitted the firing of large pieces. Since establishing her studio in Baltimore, Maryland, Peled’s own kiln has required her adaptation to making sculptures in pieces or working small to form large-scale creations and installations.
During the Long Beach period, Peled was invited to make a sculpture for the luxury resort, JOALI, in the Republic of Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Inspired by global warming and the bleaching of nearby coral reefs, Maldives Vibes is primarily white with shards of extruded porcelain in orange, pink, salmon, and gold tones. Peled’s work, situated in an exterior pool near the resort’s spa, joins work by artists from South Africa, Venezuela, Turkey, Spain, the US, and South Korea to offer guests an “immersive art concept.”5
Choreography
An immersive art concept, while part of JOALI’s marketing, also forms a portion of Zemer Peled’s portfolio. The first manifestation of immersive art happened at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks in 2017. Called Suspension, the work consisted of extruded white porcelain in elongated hook shapes. Starting on a frame near a skylight, Peled began hanging the shapes onto each other, gradually creating a volume of linked clay pieces held together solely by gravity. Light from above, as well as a large window, gave a cloud-like, ethereal quality to the piece. Peled described Suspension’s month-long existence as being about time and memory. “It’s like music. You have the best performance for just an hour. And then it’s all in your memory.”6
The highlight of the installation was the collaboration between siblings Zemer and Amit. Seated under Suspension with a 1733 Goffriller cello, once owned by Pablo Casals, Amit played Journey with My Jewishness accompanied on piano. There was concern that porcelain might fall, hurting Amit, or more critically, the cello, but the concert held no catastrophic moments. Amit said, “I was a bit scared because of this humongous porcelain above my head. But, then I actually really felt I’d become a part of it. Seriously. I think it changed the direct experience of the concert for the public because the cello and me and the installation became one. The music came through the porcelain shards.”7 In addition to the cello’s sound, during the four-week installation pieces fell to the floor as the fragile porcelain gave way, creating other sounds.
It might also be said that a final six-week residency at the Bernardaud Porcelain Factory in Limoges, France, in 2019 was immersive for the artist and Bernardaud’s customers. Peled was initially interested in working with the factory’s ready-made shards– the whole and partial pieces rejected as imperfect. Even though she was fascinated by these, she used unfired trimmings, instead, to create sculptures and then re-fired them. These pieces are ghostly in their whiteness and shadowy negative spaces. More importantly, however, she was exposed to china-paint overglaze and decals, which are used to decorate tableware in Bernardaud’s inventory. Peled learned the techniques of China painting and made drawings and paintings of flowers. This technique is desirable because it is quick, and low firing means speedy results. Bernardaud appreciated Peled’s flower designs to the extent that her paintings were made into decals resulting in the In Bloom dinnerware collection. The lesson here is to embrace every residency with creative ingenuity rather than a set agenda—the results can be better than expectations.
With the establishment of a permanent 1500-square-foot (139.4 m2) studio in a former warehouse, Peled has space to offer further immersive art, with concerts and events being held amongst her raw materials and finished sculpture. I imagine the acoustics are beneficial because of the high ceiling, concrete floor, and surrounding hard surfaces.
Rondo
Peled had her first child in 2021; she now has two toddlers. “I’m in a place now where I have two babies. I feel like motherhood changed me. Also my work. I’m trying to find a new voice now. I actually started working with textiles.” When her daughter was born and she was house-bound as a new mother, she bought a sewing machine, took sewing classes, and started making quilts. She draws parallels between ceramics and quilting: “In ceramics, I love the craft and the making—I’m obsessed with it. So many techniques and things that are passed down through generations. And quilting is similar. [The language is] similar to my work—large-scale creations made of small pieces.” As a gift to herself for her 40th birthday, Peled took a workshop with renowned American quilter, Nancy Crow, in May 2024.
The quilting represents a shift as a consequence of marriage and motherhood. Prior to this stage of her life, Peled was driven to travel and do residencies as well as build her ceramics career. The shards became representative of her background and a unique motif in her work. But when asked about the spikiness and unapproachability of her sculpture, Peled admits, “It’s the barrier that I put around my whole life. It’s really interesting what you say; nobody ever told me that. I rarely put myself out, like a photo. If I do put out a picture of myself, it’s when I’m working.” As mentioned previously, her audience brings more gentle associations to her work. Peled acknowledges this, “Although a lot of people say it looks very soft, like a textile you want to touch, you then see how sharp and dangerous it is. It’s very hard for me to open up to other people, to show the real self.”
Motherhood and a desire to somehow incorporate textiles with ceramics may change the nature of Zemer Peled’s sculpture. In the meantime, she’s working with terra cotta, a material to which she’s partial. She also wants to go back to large-scale construction. This is a period of transition for this internationally regarded ceramic artist whose attraction to what remains of the past is looking for new beginnings in her future.
the author D Wood has a PhD in design studies and is an independent craft scholar whose artist profiles and exhibition reviews have appeared in an international roster of art and design publications. She is the editor of and contributor to Craft is Political (Bloomsbury, 2021).
1 Melanie Lidman, “Hiker discovers 2,500-year-old ancient receipt from reign of Purim king’s father,” The Times of Israel, 1 March 2023; “Unfounded: Ancient Darius inscription shard isn’t authentic – Antiquities Authority,” The Times of Israel, 3 March 2023.
2 James Renwick Alliance for Craft, Distinguished Artist Series, February 27, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2fY3oFh6q1k.
3 Shard and sherd are interchangeable, although sherd, deriving from potsherd, is preferred by archaeologists.
4 Except where noted, Peled quotations are from an interview on September 21, 2023.
5 https://www.joali.com/media/4hmbqn5d/9-359-jm-art_immersive_luxury_2023_v3.pdf.
6 https://www.zemerpeled.com/work#/suspension/ https://vimeo.com/212982584/e545987a28.
7 Ibid.
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