Guardian golems on display
Wellington-based artist Annaliese Brown started making ceramic golems four years ago and hasn’t been able to stop.
‘‘In this room, I think there’s about a hundred, give or take,’’ she says.
‘‘It just keeps growing, and I thought maybe I’d move on by now, but I can’t, it’s sort of a deep obsession at this point.’’
Her exhibition, Golem, is on at Thistle Hall in Wellington until tomorrow, and explores the idea of finding harmony while existing between different cultures.
A golem is a creature in Jewish mysticism that is viewed as a guardian.
‘‘Golem is a Yiddish word that comes from a Hebrew word that means incomplete or unformed,’’ says Brown, who is Jewish.
‘‘I think we can all kind of resonate with that a little bit, in that we’re all learning, we’re all still growing, we all still make mistakes, we all don’t feel like we fit in.’’
The ceramic golems are made of clay, coated with a layer of glass and minerals, and range in size, colour and patterns.
Many bare a single breast, which isn’t typical for a golem.
‘‘I wanted to add that to give an acknowledgement to the original golem . . . it was this androgynous, intersex being, and I just think that’s really beautiful,’’ she says.
‘‘I wanted to give a nod to that, as well as encourage people to see the golems as something that are genderless.’’
Windows, staircases and doors are recurring images that appear on the golems, ideas that stem from Brown’s experiences while visiting Israel in her youth.
‘‘We went to this really, really ancient city that had been carved into a mountain in the desert. We got to walk inside the city, we got to go up these staircases,’’ she says.
‘‘We were inside the mountain, looking out of windows that had been carved by humans, and it was just mind-blowing.’’
The imagery stuck with Brown, and she wants to give the sense that her golems are individual structures that she’s carving communities into.
‘‘Just drawing together that ancient history, that ancient Judaism that still feels spiritually very relevant to me now,’’ she says.
‘‘I’ve been making these golems as a way of helping me to figure out who I am as an individual and therefore how I can help my communities.’’
Even a small golem can take Brown 20 hours to create, and she estimates around a thousand hours of work has gone into the exhibition.
‘‘I use a technique called coil building where, pretty much, you make long, thick, spaghetti noodles out of clay,’’ she says.
‘‘A lot of them have my fingerprints in them, and I don’t smooth those out, they’re a little bit lumpy,
so you can see that they’re made by a human.’’
Brown, 29, believes many people today struggle to find what community they fit into because they often exist between many cultures.
‘‘For me, being Jewish is a really big part of my life, but I still feel like I’m not Jewish enough, and then when I’m not in my Jewish circles I feel too Jewish, like I’m the token Jew,’’ she says.
‘‘I find making these golems helps me to have a solid form that can exist in all of those contradicting cultures in harmony, and that’s sort of my intention to help myself heal, and help my communities heal.’’ The exhibition is open today and tomorrow.