Lilach Segal
Rashi on the Corner of Haavoda St.
Urban nature on the sidewalks of Tel Aviv
Lilach Segal
Curator: Galina Arbeli
"As I walk down the city streets, observing my surroundings, I am aware of the urban nature hidden from the eye revealed along the way. In my repeated meetings with the Populneus Brachychiton and the fragrant Plumeria flowers that fall from the garden trees and the trees of the city's sidewalks, the hidden nature and I together create an intimate, contemplative world, far from the noises and cacophony of the metropolis. The Brachychiton penetrates the paving stones, lifts them, undermining the planned order, The inner and outer worlds seem to echo each other."
Lilach Segal, a Bezalel graduate who has been designing with ceramics for many years, conducts a dialogue between ceramic porcelain and urban nature in her city of residence, Tel Aviv-Yafo. Every day she walks a fixed path in her neighborhood and collects leaves, flowers and fruits that have finished blooming and fallen from the trees onto the city's gray sidewalks. She collects the remains, which seem like excess dirt to the observer passing by and immortalizes them in porcelain lest they disappear in the blowing wind or be swept off the street by the hands of the street cleaner. In doing so, she spreads them out for observation and study, as a sort of proposal for a more compassionate and sensitive world, turning the spotlight on details that have long since disappeared from the way.
Using two technologies of ceramic processing - both building plaster molds and pouring liquid porcelain into the contents and immersing the objects in a porcelain mixture known as Paper clay - the porcelain, which carries within it an ancient memory from the earth's crust, perpetuates the remains of urban nature that Lilach collects on her way through her neighborhood. In other words, nature of one kind preserves nature of another kind. At the same time, through Lilach's manipulation of the remnants of urban nature, she creates objects that blur the boundaries between the natural and man-made and constitute a type of new bread that cannot exist in the natural world. In this way, she creates an archive of never-ending leftovers, which she "freezes", preserves and embalms - and at the same time reorganizes them in different compositions.
During this Lilach remaps the urban space around her. First, she maps the road she marks within her residential neighborhood, then she maps the trees planted in the neighborhood as well as the leaves, flowers and fruits that fall from them. Finally, she collects these remains and performs an act of preservation and reorganization on them. This process repeats itself from season to season when the stock of remnants of urban nature is renewed every day, she returns for another round of collection, assemble and preservation.
In his book Espèces d'espaces (Paris: Galilée 1974) ,the essayist Georges Perec invites the reader to examine the concept of "space", to look at it with simplicity and wonder; to rediscover it and its components and to document it in writing.
similar to Georges Perec, Lilach walks through the familiar spaces of her neighborhood and with the remains preserved through porcelain "writes" her experiences from her repeated journeys on the fixed route she treads every day.
Through copying, duplicating, preserving, commemorating and reorganizing, Lilach creates in the exhibition a kind of personal archive of the urban space, a "written" space of those remains that were granted eternal life in material considered noble. When she collects the remnants of urban nature and preserves them through processes of casting and immersion in porcelain, she marks the section of streets in her neighborhood as her own space; preserves it and reorganizes it in the exhibition as a newly invented space based on the products of the urban space in which she conducts herself on a daily basis. Appropriating the urban space and its products to herself turns it into her own space, the fruit of her imagination fully owned by her. At the same time, she calls passers-by to pay attention to these duplicated remains, to see their beauty and charm and to examine how their reorganization in different forms in the gallery space creates a magic between reality and fiction.
The exhibition reflects the way in which Lilach observes the urban natural world around her every day and seeks to connect with nature and make it her own under the conditions and laws she sets. In the current time, characterized by transience and uncertainty, we need a sense of meaning. Lilach suggests that we look closely at what is around us, to notice the treasures hidden in our surroundings and to recognize the beauty inherent in everyday life and routine.
