When Martha Rieger’s son joined the IDF as a paratrooper she subsumed her anxiety by creating glass plates so rough with sand they made her hands bleed. But there was also pride mixed with anguish when he returned from the Army - “and that’s why I used real gold at the centre of those dishes,” explains the artist.
Now Rieger’s gilded pieces, some of them huge cocoons costing thousands, will be on show for the first time in London at the Collect international craft fair, returning to the Saatchi Gallery at the end of this month.
It’s not a showcase the Brazilian-born artist anticipated any more than she expected to make a career in art and a life in Israel. “I did not grow up religious in Rio, but I did go to a Jewish school and after spending a year on kibbutz at 18, I settled here,” she explains from her studio in Tel Aviv’s arty Florentin neighbourhood.
Although she had studied art in Brazil, to please parents who thought she should pursue a proper vocation - “they were doctors who would be disappointed to have an artist in the family rather than a surgeon” - she got a degree in social work in Israel. But after entering a ceramics studio in 1989 her focus shifted forever: “I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
Even so, art did not enter the picture for some time: “In a tiny studio behind my house I just made functional pieces - bowls and plates - for restaurants,” she explains. Rieger only realised her imagination was taking over when she started to make teapots that couldn’t be poured from and pieces that grew to gigantic proportions - some stand one and a half metres high.
Now her life has expanded to a much larger studio in Tel Aviv and an artists’ colony in Jingdezhen, China, famous for its pottery, where she has access to communal kilns. “Porcelain has been made there for 1700 years,” she says of the place where Ai Wei Wei famously dropped a precious ancient pot as a subversive act of artistic protest. “There are much larger kilns there than anywhere in Israel.”
Her focus now is the cocoons and giant eggs whose gold centres were inspired by those first used in the glass plates she took solace in when her oldest child Alon, now 24, was drafted into the Israeli army. “I was so afraid for him I stopped working until I felt moved to make these very rough plates - and when he came home I made him a present of one with a gold centre to represent the goodness and the gold inside his heart,” she says.
The plates will not be coming to Collect, but the cocoons are made the same way, though unlikely to be priced at the lower end of Rieger’s inventory which covers pieces ranging from $100 to $20,000.
*Collect 2019 takes place at London’s Saatchi Gallery February 28-March 3.
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