Into Wonderland: Ceramic Sculpture with Yanira Yariv

Ceramic Sculpture with Yanira Yariv

This workshop will take you on a journey of discovery, from foraging for clays in the local region, to understanding the process of ceramic sculpture, to creating your own unique hand-built piece. You will work under the guidance of master ceramicist Yanira Yariv and learn about how she infuses her artistic process with extraordinary creativity and deep meaning, alongside a sense of playful whimsy and wicked humour.

Who is the Workshop for?

The workshop is open to all. No prior experience with ceramics is required.

Workshop Structure and Inclusions

Taught in a small group format, with a maximum of 20 participants, the workshop is designed to accommodate beginners and those with more experience. Participants are asked to arrive at 9am for a 9:30am start, and the workshop will conclude at 5pm. Lunch will be provided. Please note that a follow-up session will be made available for those who wish to glaze and fire their piece/s.

About the Facilitator

Yanira Yariv is a ceramicist and filmmaker living in the south of France. Yanira says: “Very early on, I decided that I would be a painter. My studies therefore naturally lead me towards a degree in Aesthetics and Plastic Arts. But the crucial encounter

with Iranian cinema, from the 50s-80s, between documentary and fction, then led me towards a master's degree in Aesthetics (Paris I), a DEA in Anthropological and Documentary Cinema (Paris X), and a DESS in Directing Creation documentary.

Once my studies were completed, I launched myself with passion, for eighteen years, into making documentary essay films. However, the world of art and writing continues to guide and inspire my cinematographic work. In 2006, the decisive discovery of pre-Columbian ceramics during a stay in Latin America awakened the dream of one day making it my vector of expression. I had to wait until 2015 to really begin to learn the art of ceramics. First with an Athenian artist, during a long stay in Lesbos. Then, the financing for my last film project in Palestine having been blocked since 2014, and because of the difficulties linked to the pandemic, I decided to leave cinema for a while and devote myself fully to ceramics. In 2019, I entered the studio of the artist Noa Katz,

in Jafa. In 2020, I joined the Tel-Hai Ceramics School in Galilee, and finally the Academy of Fine Arts in Jerusalem, in the ceramics and glass section, under the direction of the artist Yael Atzmoni. Back in France, I took over the workshop of a couple of retired ceramic craftsmen, in Sigonce, where I set up my own workshop, in December 2022.

Artistic Approach

Yanira says: “In my childhood in Israel-Palestine, the presence of wild animals was perceptible even in the city. Then, the houses under construction, the forest, the wastelands overgrown with vegetation had become the playgrounds where my relationship with the world was based. Coming from a heterogeneous family (socially, culturally, religiously), made up of individuals displaced for generations, the idea of borders always seemed cruel to me. At a time of the 6th mass extinction and an unprecedented impact of our lifestyles on the climate, at a time of the rise of fascism throughout the world and the frightening advance of wars, the urgency of re-learning to produce, to think, to create our connection to living things and to others, influences my choices of life and creation.

My films deal with "foreignness", separation, they question the boundaries erected between humans, genders, religions, wealth, "madness" and "normality". The questioning of boundaries now extends in my ceramic work to the human and the non-human. A common thread connects all these notions: the restoration and creation of fluidity between the living entities that populate this world. The fable, the myth are thus an essential component of my approach, as a permanent dialogue between the contemporary and the ancestral, the individual and the universal.

By reconnecting with the material and the immediacy of the gesture, a new relationship took place in me with the body and with creation. The same questions thus continue to develop, with a new freedom, inspired by a search for simplicity, for a more modest art which corresponds to the ecological issues which it is now essential for me to defend, in my aesthetic approach, and in the very process of making the work. Finally, it is by exploring nature daily near the workshop that I fnd my materials, lights, shapes, and colors, by observing my animals and living beings near the hills, in the felds, on the edge of the woods which survive as best they can, that I invent my stories... Everything that inhabits my dreams, my imagination, my reality, leaves a trace of the world in perpetual change. My desire is to move the viewer, make them react, wonder, smile and convey the desire to imagine other possible worlds.”

Location

The workshop is held in person at Chateau de la Gonette, Quartier le Seris, 04150 Simiane-la-Rotonde, France.