One wild hunt

My artwork is a reckoning rooted in lineage, survival, and generational connection. Through ceramics I grapple with my own ability to endure as an echo of my German Jewish family's survival of WWII. By engaging with Flora and Fauna found in Bavarian folk textiles once produced by my great grandfather Moritz Wallach and his brothers Julius and Max, I illustrate my understanding of this history and its relationship to my own lived experience. The Wallach brothers were established as some of Munich’s most prized artisans before the Holocaust, and their legacy remains entwined with creative and personal upheaval post exile.

I employ folk creatures such as goats, geese, and rabbits to illustrate human action or reaction as very animal and instinctual. As someone who has been hunted and stalked, I question how many of the deep fears I have experienced emulate the past fears of my family. Becoming acquainted with fear has allowed me to deconstruct my understanding of survival, and in turn, see it reflected in the world around me. Creating animals who epitomize human emotion connects personal grief with universal reaction. The descriptive features of creatures such as horns, webbed feet, and long ears have become mirrors of my bodily understanding of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses.

I acknowledge reverence in survival and consider evolution a companion to fear. An abundance of floral and plant-like representations such as pomegranates, flowers, and strawberries pay homage to the kinship found between grief and reclamation. I think regularly of my Grandmother Ann, who fled Germany in 1938 at age 19 and carried a combination of sweetness and laughter throughout her long life. My experience of hardship continues to evolve towards a more realized, practiced understanding of joy. I revel in the translation of experience between generations, and with the creation of my art I work to understand how truly close we are.