To Efrat Lipkin, history gets caught in the impressions it leaves behind: in pockets, divots, cracks, and cavities. History is less a temporal progression than it is a spatial renegotiation. It bends, shapes, contorts, and rearranges our experience of the world, demanding near-constant revision of our modes of being and knowing. Efrat’s sculptures are armatures for such revision. They gesture toward the ruptures, the punctures, the perforations inevitably pitting the surface of experience while providing a scaffold for new means of being and making.
We often hear about a “poetics of materiality,” a phrasing so common it is nearly a platitude. In Efrat’s work, material takes on a dimension which interrupts the need for poetics entirely. Material, form, and practice are inseparable; each element of an installation corresponds to a system rigorously devised by the artist. In It Grew From Lung (measure by Dates) Efrat has constructed one such system, which weds tension with agility, balance with discord. Recent forays into glasswork contribute an element of precarity: glass spears tower above the viewer, while mold-blown dates rest on the floor, their vulnerability almost unbearable. Yet from this precarity emerges control. Molded glass freezes the dates in time, while the towers are held in place by a delicate, yet enduring, tension.
Efrat Lipkin (b. 1984, Israel) received a B.A. from Hamidrasha School of Art, Israel (2011), and M.F.A. from Yale University, School of Art (2020). Lipkin has exhibited in a variety of public and artist-run spaces in Tel Aviv. An Artist-teacher, Efrat, has taught in public educational institutions in Israel as a way to broaden the communication of Art to youth. At Yale, Lipkin received the Susan H. Whedon Honorary Award, in recognition of an outstanding graduating student in Sculpture, and the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship. Following a residency at the Pilchuck Glass School, her practice has expanded through the use of glasswork.
