ARTIST STATEMENT BY VAL SCHLOSBERG

These vessels each respond to a form of unsafety and express a vision of safety and solidarity through an exploration of the clay creature of Jewish lore, the golem. The golem is a central image and provocation in my art practice. The golem story, first recorded around the medieval period, tells of a Jewish population threatened by pogroms. In order to protect his community, a rabbi goes to the banks of a river and constructs a small clay figure called a golem. Using a complex recitation of different combinations of the Hebrew alphabet, the Rabbi successfully enlivens the clay, sealing it with the word אמת, “truth.” The clay figure awakens to defend the city against antisemitic attacks before being laid to rest once again. This story has been revisited and transformed countless times over: In the introduction to her book "The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction," Elizabeth Baer quotes a description of the golem as the “ultimate crisis monster” elaborating that “the golem starts wandering the streets at times of crisis, when people are worried. He is a projection of society’s neuroses, a symbol of our fears and concerns.”

The image and story of the golem invites me to imagine the potential for clay – enlivened through intention – to be a force against fascism. It is a myth that asserts the power of the relationship between language and form to create worlds and fight the imposing threat of authoritarianism, violence, and empire. A central intention of my proposed work is to continue to imagine and re-imagine what it means to create golems for the various crises of our current day. This process is both metaphorical and literal, both imaginary and embodied. I often say, “all golems are real golems,” by which I mean, the clay I bring to life has real power to disrupt unjust systems, to tell painful truths, and to be in service and allyship to my communities and the communities that I am in solidarity with.