Rachel Menashe Dor

Rachel Menashe Dor is currently a 2nd year graduate student at RISD in the Ceramics department. She holds a Bachelor and MSc degrees in Geology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. During the late 1990’s and the early 2000’s Rachel worked in small ceramics studios in Jerusalem and Los Angeles with various artists. She began to study Ceramics Art at California State University Long Beach at 2004.
Her background as a geologist finds an expression in her past and current art works. Rachel is focused on the delicacy and the details of natural forms and their ephemeral characteristics both on micro and macro levels. She invites the viewer to explore and situate himself in the environments she creates, an experience often parallel to the displacement she feels in foreign surroundings.

Memories of landscape
Mixed media (ceramics, wood, metal)
2008







Landscape, especially in the southwest United States, is vast compare to the human scale and continuous in both space and time, surrounding the viewer during his visit. Despite the large scale and the continuous nature of a landscape, it often lasts in our memory as a collection of isolated scenes of both the broad and the detailed landform. Back home, we often try to transform those fragments of a landscape, as they exist in our memory back to the feeling we had outdoor.
In this installation I try to capture the perception of the southwest’s desert landscape as it is in my memory: snap-shots of terrain ‘islands’, scattered with no particular geographic arrangement, in a scale that inverts the proportions between the viewer and what he sees. The installation, rather than representing the true nature of the desert terrains, reflects more on the intimacy that one may feel with places he visited, as they are no longer part of a continuous environment. In that installation I invite the viewer to step into my collection of landscape memories where a “vast landscape” becomes an intimate experience.