Location: Israel
I am an artist whose work explores aspects of being female in contemporary society. My subjects include family and relationships, ceremony and ritual, memory and death.
My art often focuses on the female body with all its changes during pregnancy and motherhood, and the various stages of aging and entropy. I am interested in the surface of the human envelope, the failings of its structures as it ages, and our attempts to minimise these failings.
I also like to explore traditional texts, especially the Bible, in new ways, and to shine a light on family material from the Holocaust.
I studied art at a variety of institutions in London and California, and most recently at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. I have taught art to children for some years and for the last 17 years have acted as volunteer guide at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (www.imj.org.il).
My oeuvre is very varied as I work in a wide variety of media: painting, ceramics and sculpture, video art and photography, print-making and installation pieces.
My art can be found in private collections on three continents, and in the Ben Uri Gallery (The London Jewish Museum of Art) UK, and in Israel, in the Jerusalem Print Workshop, the Ein Harod Museum of Art and Yad Vashem Museum collections.
I work from my studio in Jerusalem, Israel.
Ruth Schreiber
www.ruthschreiber.com
A selection of recent 3D pieces
“Untitled (the Female Side of God)”
My inkjet print, “Untitled (The Female Side of God)” brings a focus to female power, a woman taking the place of the male God in Michelangelo’s familiar image of Creation, from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. This fits in with your subject since women have always been creators in the sense of childbirth and child rearing, but in recent decades have become first movers in all branches of society- Prime Ministers, Ministers, Members of Parliament, doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors CEOs, in all Western countries. Women are even found now in high positions in armies, that last bastion of male exclusivity. It’s true that women still do not always and everywhere achieve equal pay for equal work, when compared to men; it’s true that professions in which women outnumber men are still poorly paid- e.g. teaching and nursing. Nevertheless the principle of equal pay for equal work has been established and the concept of female ability, intelligence, reliability, staying power has been widely accepted.
We do still think of God, if we consider God at all, as male. All Christian art as well as the arts of other religions, generally hold with this traditional, widespread view. My artwork invites a fresh look at this idea, and therefore also at its corollaries.
This work of two skulls, hand-built of natural dark clay, confounds expectations both because of the title: Two Sisters and because of the colour of the skulls. We don’t ever see people’s skulls and certainly don’t identify them by their skulls. We couldn’t say whether or not there is a family resemblance here. Also, these skulls are dark brown, but even black people, with very dark skin, have white skulls.
The sculpture is life-size and depicts the 2 dark brown skulls side-by side, facing the same way.
“Be Fruitful and Multiply”
“Old House in Moon Forest”
“Two Sisters”
“Childhood Remembered”
“Tribute to Klimt”
