Varda Zisman
In my public work, I am committed to encouraging creativity with clay both as a means of self-expression and as a therapeutic tool for children, young people and adults.
In my personal work, the dialogue between clay and my hands enables multiple aspects of my being to emerge: conscious and unconscious, seen and unseen, that which I seek and that which seeks me.
The following is a quotation from an essay by Jonathan Miles written for the Down to Earth exhibition at the Ruskin Mill Gallery, in Nailsworth Gloucestershire, in October 2010.
“Varda Zisman’s ceramic work is a presentation of emergent forms even the figuring of form of such. Taken as a whole they might evoke the type of emergent figuring that is apparent in the desolate landscapes of the surrealist Yves Tanguy which suggest a meeting point or metamorphosis of vegetable, animal, rock or human realms. They stand as seeds of thought and form occasioning a co-operation of the sensuous and the intelligible. In this respect they are without exact location, criss-crossing different cultural formations or realms but having said this they contain a connection to an idea of becoming itself. This suggests they desire both the possibility of being rooted whilst insisting upon mobility. In this way they make proper sense by being understand as clusters that are able to reconnect and reassemble themselves according to occasion. They might even have a space as imaginative ciphers or even toys for adults attempting to realign their psychic formations in new ways.”
