Each of the 37 works displayed in From the Melting Pot into the Fire is of such highly individual design that one cannot claim that there is a specific Israeli style in ceramics. Each of the artists grabbles with her own perception of what Israel means to her. The emphasis here is on 'her'. As Yael Novak, one of the artists on display here, and who came to the Gardiner to liaison between the museum and the Ceramic Artist Association of Israel, explained: "Ninety-five percent of ceramic artists in Israel are women."

This is an astounding fact, one that makes one wonder what exactly in Israeli society brings about such disproportion between male and female ceramic artists. Yet, looking at the works on display, few can be claimed to have a strong feminine tone. Novak's own work on display, In Between the Pots, is a strong statement without gender classification. It works on our visual perception as we gaze at positive and negative spaces created by her red, slip-cast clay 'pots', for which she used the ancient Roman terra sigilatta finish. This finish eventually appeared everywhere around the Mediterranean basin. In her work one can discover a variety of shapes that recall a cypress tree, a minaret, a modern water tower, and architectural styles that imply the cultural diversity of Israel, modern and ancient. It is a truly multi-cultural work, in a manner we understand in Canada. As the visitor will discover, quite a large number of the works on display echo architecture, although in wholly unrealted ways.

As one enters the exhibit at the Gardiner, one is greeted on the right hand side by a display of Our Daily Bread, created by Mirvat Issa. While these piled-up, hollow clay shapes are reminiscent of dried loaves of bread, they leave a far darker image on the mind. Piles of skulls. This subtext of something less benign seems to inhabit many items in this display. Consequently, the viewer may find a sense of sadness, or of confinement, inherent in the works even though none of the artists describe their creations in this manner. There is also here and there dark humor present to offset a sense of claustrophobia that dwells in some works through their relationship to architectural shapes.

The humor is implicit in Zipi Geva's prickly Sabras in a Tin Can. The Sabras, as we know the word, are the native-born Israelis, who were there before the immigrants from across Europe and other parts of the world came to Israel. Sabra has found its place in modern Hebrew through the Arabic sabr, where it means cactus or aloe, or can even mean patience. Geva describes the Sabras as "a wonderful combination of honesty, warmth and national pride on the one hand, and a roughness and chutzpa on the other. They are like sweet and juicy fruits that exist underneath a thorny skin." As Novak stated while explaining this work, in Hebrew sabra also means what we call prickly pears. This is a cactus fruit common to the Mediterranean basin, but also to the Southern United States and Mexico.

Humor is also apparent in Dina Sahar's Urban Tiles, which are polymer coated ceramic tiles in which she mirrors "typical Israeli residential buildings," that she has transformed into decorative elements. Presented in groups of mirrored fours, they take on a decorative form that is totally unexpected. They reminded me of some amazing decorative tiles in an ancient Peruvian monastery and a convent. They, too, are configured in four mirrored tiles of images inspired by Spain's Moorish heritage and imprinted a similar, unexpected, experience on the mind.

Dalia Fisch Benari and Judith Sirota's Inside Out is a freestanding column of hand-built ceramic slabs, cast concrete and metal in which "the outer part depicts nature as a wild landscape with plant life and rough surfaces." The artists further describe this work as a structure with an opening that "enables a glimpse of the inside, revealing delicate, illuminated porcelain that suggests the artificiality of culture." For the onlooker, though, that interior can also be viewed as a curtain that separates the interior from the exterior, the female life from that of the male in Israeli society, as well as their Palestinian neighbors.

Lea Sheves presents a variety of five ornamental shapes made of stoneware and under-glazes. Each half circle contains a decorative square that allows light to fall through a variety of designs. She describes her work thus: "Ornament is integral to pottery and can powerfully represent cultural and geographic identity." She further states, "The juxtaposition in these pieces of austere geometry inspired by local Bauhaus architecture with eastern ornamental design expresses an attempt to combine diverse aesthetics. These ceramic objects can thus be viewed as symbols of an emerging visual language." The question is, what else do they impart? Again one felt a sense of enclosure, of confinement. They recalled the "Moorish-inspired" covered windows that can be found from Spain to Sicily, Malta, and all around the Mediterranean, and in many South American countries where women were or are kept hidden from view. Is this a conscious or a subconscious creation on part of Sheves? One feels compelled to ask this because real Bauhaus architecture is quite the opposite and offers up no such confining reaction.

Ruth Barkai's work more directly states confinement. She calls her 2006 works "Locked Up". In her statement she wonders if in future the flat Mediterranean-style roof and the European sloping roof will co-exist. "The look becomes a cultural symbol for the relationship between outside and inside, private and public—a fundamental part of human existence."

Ziona Benor's Return to Sender seems to express a sense of insecurity many Israelis feel about the permanency of their state. It depicts floating houses of porcelain, stoneware, paper clay and glazing. "My house (which I don't own) changes location depending on where life takes me," she writes. While this is a good philosophy for life, one wonders if her sense of impermanence runs far deeper.

Anna Kirzner created Free Space, a work that can be described as a mixed-media work in that it combines hand-built porcelain with a video. We are presented with porcelain suitcase containing four storeys of drawers, some of them open, and in the lid we are presented with a video in which a female dressed in black moves and strains against the walls that surround her. Kirzner states, "We all surround ourselves with borders and frames by creating ideas, definitions and concepts about things. At the same time, we constantly try to break these borders, and we forget that we created them. All that is needed to be free of these borders and to see the unlimited possibilities and potential of everything is not to take these concepts seriously." One wonders, though, how many people strain against ideas and limitations set on them they did not create? Is this not something that has to be considered when taking a look at this work?

One can go on and on about the 37 pieces in this exhibit, but let me state that what we think of as multi-cultural is a very different pluralism of that presented here. One had expected that artists from the two other cultural groups in Israel, the Christian and the Palestinian-Muslim artists would have been included. Only one work hints at the idea of more than one religious background inhabiting Israel. The artist Martha Rieger, born in Brazil of a mixed Jewish-Christian family, but raised as a Jew chosen Israel as her country. She admits that there exists a the two cultures create tug within her—for religion can also imply culture. "Two of the bottles in my work are covered with the symbols of the two faiths while the third bottle symbolizes the melting pot which is me." That is somehow what the title of this exhibit implies to the Canadian sensibility. Not that one is disappointed with the works on display, but one soon realizes that the concept of a melting pot or of a multi-cultural state can be interpreted in many different ways.