Artist imagines Palestine through conquest and female forms
Vera Tamari in front of her work “Warriors Passed by Here”
reports in Al-Monitor:
In front of a solemnly dark wall, eleven military helmets and face guards rest atop metallic rods, conjuring images of heads on sticks, perhaps severed in battle. In Vera Tamari’s powerful piece “Warriors Passed by Here,” each piece of glazed ceramic headgear represents the army of a conqueror that ruled Palestine, her home and a frequent focus of her work.
The Jerusalem-born Tamari works primarily with clay to create sculptures, bas-reliefs and “sculptured paintings,” in which the curves of the female body symbolize land and nature. At the age of 30, Tamari became the first artist to open a ceramics studio on the West Bank, in 1975, in al-Bireh, near Ramallah. Her latest exhibition, also titled “Warriors Passed by Here,” can be seen at Gallery One, in the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah.
The show, featuring 40 pieces of her work, includes Tamari’s well-known ceramics figures along with a series of watercolors, which, she explained, are reflections of her personal memories of the land, the people and the history of Palestine.
A curator and an academic, Tamari received her undergraduate degree from Beirut College for Women in 1966 and later studied ceramics in Florence, in 1974. She eventually taught for more than 20 years at Birzeit University, in Ramallah, focusing on art history, art, and Islamic art and architecture, the latter in which she received a master’s from Oxford University in 1984. Tamari also helped establish and later ran the Ethnographic and Art Museum at Birzeit between 2005 and 2010.