Dona Jonathan Cohen

Kibutz Kivutz Kibotz (Kibutz, shrinking, like mud)

There is a place in the world called Israel,

Inside this place there is a kibbutz,

In the centre of the kibbutz there is a dining room,

In the dinning room there is a community that were once idealists,

But not any more.

Forty five years ago I arrived with my family to kibbutz Maagan Michael.I was then an eight year old girl, who arrived directly into communal sleeping, a foreign concept from all I had known.I choose to stay as a member of the kibbutz, the place I had grown up and been educated in, and start a family of my own.Since then every thing has changed, me, the kibbutz, the country, the world.The only thing that almost didn’t change is the kibbutz dining room.Since the beginning the dinning room was the beating heart of the kibbutz, the structure that all paths led to.There are those who saw the kibbutz dinning room as a sort of secular temple, spiritual, political and cultural meeting place.All the kibbutz world is summarized into a dinning room tray: the food, the home, community communication channel, where the individual sometimes feels very alone.I am searching for the connection between the kibbutz and it’s location through clay.

For many years I believed I would only be a “real” ceramic artist when I had clay of my own. I found this material in the fields of the kibbutz. With the help of soil and my kiln I am using the concept of the dinning room tray as a reflection of the kibbutz, trying to show the changes in the kibbutz and in myself.I cannot see the change as it happens but only after the kiln is cool.I am leaving it to my kiln to give the final design of the objects. The kiln represents time, and changes to the object, the nature, the values.