Offerings 2026 Bezalel Initiative Jerusalem

Offerings

Jacaranda Kori

Curator: Yael Atzmony, Head of the Department of Ceramics and Glass Design

For thirty years, Jacaranda Kori has been examining ritual not as a subject but as an action. Her Mexican roots, grounded in a world where the offering is not a metaphor but a bodily memory, constitute the conceptual and sensory basis for a ceramic practice in which the process itself is the ritual. For her, ritual is not the preserve of the past or the origin; life here, in the present, is also saturated with rituals: in repetition, in gestures, and in moments in which the everyday bears a meaning beyond itself.

In parallel with her work as an artist, Kori has been teaching pottery for forty years to diverse audiences, from amateurs to professionals, and especially to generations of Bezalel students who have become artists themselves. From her years of teaching, she has developed a didactic theory of her own: how to build a vessel, how to be faithful to the material and its history, and how to work with gratitude and respect for the ceramic tradition. Teaching, for her, is not the transmission of technique—it is itself an offering: a repetitive, cumulative action, passed down from hand to hand.

In his film and exhibition, A Clay Sermon, which was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, London 2021, Theaster Gates positions clay as a philosophy and the potter as someone who learns to shape the world. In the film, he stands, walks, and kneels in space, singing songs and improvising while working with the clay—like a kind of priest-artist conducting a ceremony before an absent community. The entire creative process, from digging up the clay to firing it, is presented as a complete ritual act. But he goes beyond the cult of the individual artist. The rituals—prayer, repeated turnings of pottery, refrains that inscribe themselves through repetition—gather transmitted and accumulated knowledge. This is knowledge that is not stored in books but in the body. As Gates says: “I know more because I’ve touched more.” Pottery, like community, is a vessel that carries memory.

Their end point is similar—but Kori’s path there is completely different: her creative process is always bound up with memories, thoughts, and associations—emotional responses she chooses to make inseparable from the work itself. The current work is largely a personal diary, a record of the stirrings of the soul through the material. Flexible and elusive at first, the clay gradually undergoes a process of crystallization until the firing that fixes it. Each object has a point in time, a moment and an emotion marked in the material.

In her works, she seeks to recreate the ritual of offering as a universal experience through a series of actions with material. The act of pottery-making for Kori is not just a means to creation but an offering. Her vessels are not ends in themselves: they invite, attract, and activate. In her own words: “The vessel connects people, and the design in clay allows me to illuminate, reveal, and even challenge a wide range of symbolic and cultural connections, which I present as a living point of association.”

The group of works that Jacaranda presents is part of a process that moves between the turns of the wheel and intuitive, direct, unmediated creation—not a straight line but a circle, material becomes insight, insight becomes material.