Ruudt Peters
HOLANDA
As someone familiar with Jewish Mysticism can infer, the title “Sefiroth” refers to the Mystical Cabbala, and the symbolism repeated in all of the pieces (in this case brooches) is the Tree of Life, a geometrical pattern of silver spheres bound together by “paths” of the same material. Given names derived from the different Sefiroth, each of the “Tree” structures are adorned with other materials such as blown and formed glass, polyester, silk and directly-photocopied imagery, which serve to give volume, color, form or (print-) imagery to each of the small sculptures. Each brooch therefore, connotes a starkly different interpretation of its namesake, an interpretation that one must see not as a direct reference to the Sefiroth in question, but as the artists’ metaphor for how each may relate to his personal experiences. The result can infer spiritual mystery as in “Gilgalim”, with a winding brain-like mass of lustrous glass covering and diffusing the tree-structure underneath, while other pieces may invoke a more scientific form-speak. In “Chesed”, for example, whose’ namesake refers to “Cohesive or Receptive Intelligence”, the individual Sefroth float, without a grid, on a cloudy layer of polyester, the surface of which is pierced by numerous green wire-ends which reemerge at the rear of this layer, in bundles like nerves bridging the divide between the human and spiritual worlds. In Contrast, “Nezach” which relates to the Seventh Sefiroth, “the place of the emotions, the feelings, the powers that stimulate creativity” can be read as an expression of the artist’s darker, painful emotions, as heavy, bulbous forms of mineral grow like tumors over four of the spheres, dominating the form that it grows upon.
