Breathing Through the Cracks

Breathing Through the Cracks

A breaking point is a threshold, the limit of one’s ability to contain. It is a moment when the life forces stored within us are reexamined in the face of a reality that suddenly turns upside down, shakes our world, and fundamentally undermines the stability that, seemingly, had been there before.

The works of the three artists participating in the exhibition explore the very ability to look squarely at states of physical and emotional crisis and cope with them. Through working processes involving fragile materials such as porcelain and glass, they create a space in which the wound is not concealed but exposed, taking on form and presence.

This approach is well known in Japan through the art of kintsugi—a traditional technique for repairing broken ceramic vessels with lacquer mixed with gold powder. Beyond the act of repair itself, the idea underlying kintsugi offers a way of viewing and relating to breakage: not as a flaw to be hidden, but as testimony to what the body or vessel has undergone, as an inseparable part of its existence.

In Iris Nesher’s works, delicate porcelain vessels sometimes resemble wounded bodies or ghostly shells. The cracks, tears, and folds that emerge during the process, as well as the traces of joining their wing-like parts, become an essential part of the work. As an expression of human vulnerability, they emphasize the empty space that has opened within it.

The greenhouse panes at Noa Hagiladi’s family moshav shattered in a hailstorm during her childhood. The fragments of this great explosion continue to appear in her works even years later, both as imagery and as material. Her work If I’m Crazy was created בעקבות a mental crisis and emotional upheaval she experienced. The remnants of the shattered glass roof—silent witnesses to the helplessness, loneliness, and sadness that struck her with full force—carry the words and transparent silences that remained around them.

In her glass works, breakage is not an end but a temporary state. It appears again and again as a moment in an ongoing cycle of disintegration and reconciliation.