Sphinx
photos credit : Matan Divald
'Sphinx' is an installation that is made of memory, writing, light, and glass. The creature Sphinx is mysterious and enigmatic, and so, the installation Sphinx deals with not-understanding and with ways of understanding.
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The installation consists of sculpted glass objects, and glass sheets that writing appears on them. Through that, 'Sphinx' creates an interim state between understanding and misunderstanding, and between what-is and what-is-not; between the attempt to reach an understanding, and to strive for certain knowledge about reality, and residing in lack of understanding as a kind of wonder.
'Sphinx' deals with the experience of the primal and the experience of the fundamental; it deals with the crude, but yet, with an attempt to reach gentleness.
Materials: glass
Technique: glass blowing, hot glass sculpting, glass cold-working, floating glass, sandblasting, vinyl laser cutting
A childhood memory had driven me to make the work Sphinx, it is the moment I became aware to myself:
I remember I set in my room; I raised one hand and I laid my second hand. I watched the raised hand, and I saw it in the sun-light, covered with dots of all colors I knew. I thought to myself that the matter of the hand must be in only one color, and I do not see the hand, but only light, enveloping it like a shell. I felt texture through the hand I laid and felt the space that it occupied, in a similar way to seeing. I thought to myself that I still didn't experience the hand itself, but only through what is outside it. I wondered how one thing can be experienced in several different ways, and what experience is more real.
I thought "I'm Matan, I am four and a half".
photo credit : Matan Divald