[Missing Credit]The Tall Vessel of Self Sufficiency, Marice Cumber 2023

 

Other panels detail food that Eva would cook – apple strudel, holishkes, cheesecake with a pastry base. And Cumber’s other work in the exhibition was also based on her Jewish family history.

I wasn’t the only person to be profoundly moved by the works. She’s been delighted by the reaction, from Jews and non-Jews alike. “I didn’t realise how significantly poignant and moving and emotional people would find them,” she says; “and how people connected to it, I had no idea because I just made them for myself.” They tell a very Jewish story, but also a refugee’s story – she’s had non-Jewish people tell her that it could be their families.
She made her first version of the tall pot on a residency hosted by a patron, who is also Jewish. They talked about their shared history, and “all of a sudden, you find another member of your club and you’re really excited and you try to join it all up”. Then the work was fired at a communal kiln: “When it came out, all the women there were crying – they were very moved.” The patron bought the first version, but Cumber later made another. She entered the two works for the Royal Academy show, but has no intention of selling them – “they’ll go to my daughters”.

Cumber studied at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy, then returned to the UK and started making ceramics. A successful business making bespoke works followed, then she started teaching business skills to art students, and rose up the ladder in the academic world. But in 2010 she realised she was burnt out – “I spent a year sitting on my sofa” – and eventually went back to teaching, also setting up a charity, Accumulate, to teach art to homeless people.” It uses three core elements of my my career, creativity, education, and enterprise, it really has changed lives,” she says.

[Missing Credit]The Big Bucket of Feeling Fabulous (At Last), Marice Cumber 2023

At an exhibition of the charity’s work in 2017 a friend challenged her, asking when she was going to make ceramics again. “It was like a dagger to my heart, because actually what he was saying was, you know, of course you can do all of this. but it’s like a substitute. You know, you’re not really doing what you should be doing. It’s not the real work.” The very next day she rented a ceramics studio.

When she had spent her year sitting on a sofa, burnt out and depressed, she wrote many of her thoughts in a notebook, and now she used those words on oversized mugs and vessels. “They’re not easy works necessarily to live with if you really read them you look at what I’m communicating and I’m communicating my own struggles and my own difficulties and my own challenges.” And among those challenges currently is the growing antisemitism that she’s very aware of, including in the art world. She shows me a new work, The Vessel of Truth and Disclosure (Being a Jew in 2025) that she’s covered in phrases that people use about Jewish people: “Jew rat” and “Anne Frank fake” included. Alongside are her responses, some despairing – “We shout but no one is listening” – others defiant: “I won’t be silent for you”, “I belong to my tribe.” In this context, she’s all the happier that her work had such a great reception at the Royal Academy. “It’s getting a lot of attention and it’s just brilliant. I mean, I’ve absolutely loved every second of it.”

Keren David

Ruth Craig

Artist Ruth Craig[Missing Credit]

 

Just after October 7, Ruth Craig retreated to her studio for some solitude and started working on a new sculpture. As she set to work on the piece of stone, her “mind turning over about the horror that was unfolding” in Israel following the Hamas attack, she had no idea what her piece was going to be. It just unfolded.

“It was impossible at that moment to escape that experience of being a witness, and the only way I could help myself through it was to go off on my own and work for hours on this piece,” says Craig, who lives in Hampstead. “I decided to see where it led me, and it suddenly started to become these hands.” She adds, “Sculpture is a form of prayer for me, and meditation.”

The artwork, which was displayed last year at Exploring Grief and Loss Through Art (2024) at the Willesden Gallery, is a simple yet moving sculpture of two hands holding each other. “I wanted for those hostages to be back with their families, and I wanted them to be touching,” says Craig. “The two hands are clasping together, symbolising peace.”

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As Craig works, she keeps in mind the Jewish concept of tikkun olum – honouring the world around you. To blend her sculpture into the environment where it is currently exhibited at the Himalayan Garden Sculpture Park New Sculptors (2025), she incorporated cascades of moss.

With a degree in textile design and design technology, Craig started sculpture in 2019, having never created anything three-dimensional before. She took classes in clay figure-making at the Hampstead School of Art, which she describes as a special community of artists who encourage people to find their creativity. It gave the busy mother of four a few hours during the week which were solely hers. “I immediately found a sense of sanctity and tranquillity,” she says. “When I am working, time stops.”

Inspired by an “amazing” Jewish sculptor at the school, she then graduated to stone carving. When the pandemic hit, she was able to continue sculpture in the studio she’d built at the bottom of her garden.

Ruth Craig at work on a sculpture[Missing Credit]

 

“I’d built the studio because I immediately knew that this was something incredibly special that I had to take forward, and it enabled me to work from home yet not disrupt family life,” she says. “Because the stone is quite toxic, you need space to do it; it’s a very messy business.”

Her main material is alabaster – a stone aged seven million years – but she also works with steatite which is 300 million years old. “The idea that you have a piece of stone that is millions of years old, and that you are breaking it down to create a shape blows my mind. Perhaps you could find a fossil that had not been exposed since the dinosaurs were running around. It’s an honour to be the one that’s uncovering this. I feel you have a responsibility to each ancient piece of stone, to honour it and not waste it.”

The tactile aspect of Craig’s work is important; she welcomes people to interact with the stone, creating a connection between the centuries-old material and the person touching it.

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Her work, exploring identity, family relationships and socio-cultural issues such as migration, has featured in past exhibitions including Re:store Re:new Re:imagine (2021) and The Chelsea Art Society Summer Exhibition (2024, 2025). Her head of a sleeping baby was inspired by her newest extended family member, who was born on another continent.

“My family is very spread out throughout the world, and I have family in America that I adore,” she says. “I love that newborn baby time. It’s a very emotional time to connect with a new soul, and the only way I could do that was to create a sculpture to celebrate his birth.

Elisa Bray

Maya Amrami

Artist Maya Amrami[Missing Credit]

  

In December 2023, Maya Amrami signed into her Instagram account and posted about the sexual violence committed by Hamas. She awoke the following morning to more than 7,000 – mostly hateful – comments.

“It was very scary,” says the artist who moved to London from Israel 20 years ago for professional opportunities. “I was doxed by an influencer who posted my profile picture and a direct link to my account.”

Amrami is interested in the intersection of art, technology and Jewish identity, and in her ongoing series Hate-Made Self-Portraits, she takes that hate speech directed at her online and uses generative AI to re-imagine herself through it. Self portrait as a bitch from hell, Self portrait as a satanic Zionist supporter, Self portrait as a disgusting pig, Self portrait as a Zionist child killer are just some of the insults captured in her art.

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“Since October 7, the hostility I faced online has intensified and my art has become more explicitly a way to confront and transform antisemitic discourse,” she says. “The resulting portraits are unsettling, sometimes grotesque, sometimes uncannily beautiful and always estranged from how I see or experience myself.”

She then materialises these digital images in textile by printing them on fabric and sewing them to create soft, sensory objects. “I make hate and negativity pleasurable to touch and engage. It is an attempt to transform these energies into something I can metabolise.”

Jewishness is at “the core” of this work centring on self-portraiture and how it manifests in digital spaces. “I see it less as fixed identity than as constant process of negotiation,” she says. “Being Jewish today means living in the tension between visibility and erasure.”

Her most recent installation, The Banality of Hate Speech? Or the Theatre of Cruelty? presented at the 2025 Contemporary Antisemitism Conference at JW3, embedded these self-portraits within familiar domestic forms such as a chair, a Purim mask and framed pictures. “It highlighted the normalisation of antisemitic discourse in the way hate infiltrates everyday objects that surround me.”

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With such creative use of objects, it makes sense that Amrami worked for more than a decade as a prop maker and set stylist for television and film, before she studied fashion design with a focus on textiles and print. She had always been drawn to concept-driven processes, using print media, textiles and installation work.

“Art gradually became the space where I could synthesise all these experiences – concept, material, technology and identity – to process both the world around me and my position within it,” she says.

Alongside being an artist, Amrami is a researcher working on her PhD and a junior research fellow for the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA). It allows her to both create and critically contextualise her work within a long history of Jewish artistry as well as the antisemitism embedded within society, from medieval blood libels to their popularisation throughout 19th-century culture, and beyond. Amrami cites historical figures such as Nosferatu and the golem – whose myth has become a key metaphor in her work – and other caricatures painting Jews as inhuman and malevolent, which persist in contemporary culture and find new expression today on social media.

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“My art engages with this legacy, exposing how Jewish otherness is repeatedly constructed through misrepresentation and demonisation, reimagining these projections through digital and material forms,” she says.

Her inspirations include Claude Cahun and Egon Schiele, who each used self-portraiture to explore identity and otherness, as well as Rachel Garfield, whose writing on Jewishness influences her work.

Amrami does not see art as offering solutions to the troubling representations of Jews that persist in ever-evolving ways. However, she does believe “it has the power to shift perception, to make visible what is otherwise lost in the mundane and to create affective experiences that words alone cannot.”

She adds, “Ultimately, art for me is not only a way of making but a way of living and thinking – an ongoing dialogue with the world, with technology and with the precariousness of being Jewish today.”

Elisa Bray

Liron Kroll  

When Liron Kroll started out as a photographer more than 20 years ago, she was “completely” devoted to the artform. “Every moment felt like a potential photograph, and missing one made me anxious,” says the Israeli-born artist who moved to London for a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in 2009 and never left.

A rooftop bus ride in India proved a turning point in her career. Dropping her camera and shattering it, instead of panic she felt an unexpected sense of freedom.

Child Care, 2013, digital photomontage by Liron Kroll[Missing Credit]

 

“That was the moment I began to move away from capturing reality exactly as it was and toward creating images I could shape and control,” she says. “It opened up space for me to blend different dimensions of time and place, crafting family photographs that carried more emotional weight.”

Growing up experiencing photography’s evolution from analogue to digital to the algorithmic age shaped Kroll’s fascination with how pictures help to build identity across generations. “I often find myself questioning the authenticity of the images we inherit, while navigating the digital spaces that will one day shape my children’s memories,” she says, recalling how her own connection to family photo albums began when she was young. “I saw them almost like a fairy tale or a manual for life. But as I grew older, I felt a certain unease. My own life didn’t seem to produce similar images, and I wondered what that meant.”

For more than a decade, Kroll has been drawn to examining the “realness” of family photography. Today, her artistic process sits somewhere between painting and photography. Drawing on the “familiar language” of family photos, she stages and digitally manipulates her images so that they feel “emotionally true” if not quite factual.

Memory Seed, 2024, AI and digital photomontage by Liron Kroll[Missing Credit]

Through photomontage, digital painting and animation, she reworks domestic scenes into something new, and one of these, Memory Seed, was shown at the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition last month and selected for a show at the Saatchi Gallery.

“The images are deliberately removed from pure photographic realism,” she says. “They’re built from dozens of photographs, often with staged characters, into an imagined realism that’s not tied to any single time or place.”

Kroll sees art as playing an important role in imagining the future and offering new ways of seeing the world, which is in part why she is drawn to modern techniques. “Culture is constantly shifting around us, and I feel that especially strongly in photography, and in the context of family photography. My work is a response to those changes. I’m always caught between a strong sense of nostalgia, and deep curiosity and excitement about what’s still to come. The pull of memory and the push toward innovation is where I feel most creatively alive.” Kroll is inspired by a multitude of artists and theorists: Cindy Sherman’s explorations of photography’s relationship with identity, social norms and the perception of truth, and Caroline Walker’s intimate portrayals of women, particularly mothers, in domestic settings. Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Marianne Hirsch have shaped her thinking about photography’s intersections with memory and identity. Key to her work is her Jewish heritage and its links to family and memory.

High Expectations - The Pool, 2011, digital photomontage by Liron Kroll[Missing Credit]

“For many Jewish people there’s a strong emphasis on remembrance and storytelling, which gives photographs a meaningful role,” she says. “In families shaped by movement, cultural heritage and generational distance, images can serve as emotional anchors. Memory, in Jewish culture, isn’t just about marking time; it’s about identity, belonging, and connection. It’s like a cultural spinal cord, something that holds us together across generations, continents and shifting realities.”

She says that living in the UK, far from her homeland, has sharpened that awareness for her. “Memory, and photography as a way to hold and reimagine it, has become a way to stay connected to my heritage, even from a distance.”

Elisa Bray