ABOUT

GOLEMS: AN OLD/NEW PERSPECTIVE

I wish I could say that it did not take Judeophobic violence and bigotry to inspire my desire to study the Sefer Yetzirah (The Jewish Book of Formation) in order to revive golem-making, but our purest intentions often only reveal themselves in times of crisis. Especially after the waves of firebombings and attacks in Australia where I now keep my studio, I have sought to create artifacts that facilitate and protect Jewish life by embracing uniqueness and transcending the Western art object to serve a Jewish purpose. A contemporary golem. 

But what is a golem’s purpose in our times? What is it made of? Are they imposing or approachable? Liturgically they do simple tasks, crafted from mud, clay, or even wood.  In modernity, they are powerful symbols and allegorical archetypes. I revive this, while expanding what constitutes raw material (tohu v’bohu) in our internet age. While I use indigenous materials like Dead Sea mud, in the era of artificial intelligence and social media, the digitally crafted golem asks new questions of risk and reward from creating helpers in cyberspace. Tasks can be both menial and complex, often the simplest being the most profound. Now more than ever, protectors have renewed purpose, but just as important is a golem that makes us question, critique, and imagine anew what safety really looks like and how we can best generate that as Jews and as human beings. 

My research has taken me through art history and strange technologies. Through torah, talmud, and kabbalah, as is necessary in order to make Golems halachically. In so doing I have come to understand Golem-making in its contemporary context. When I inscribe life into each golembe it through paint, clay, paper, or pixels, I do so not as a fine artist nor folk artist, but as something distinctly in-between. This is my way of contributing to the aesthetic landscape and cultural conversation in our times.

GOLEM/SELF

My Golem/Self first emerged in early 2023 through my paper sculpture technique, taking documents and paper that hold meaning to my life and transfiguring them –and the letters on their pages – into new forms. I did not know at the time that my practice was already implementing the concepts of the kabbalistic ritual.

This golem is comically lopsided and inefficient, a satirical ode to my own experience living with congenital scoliosis. And yet beyond its physical inhibitions, the dichotomy emulates its symbolic equilibrium. Its blue hand represents sacred creativity while its red foot stands for our inherent destructive capabilities. The life cycle of its appendages is held together by the earthiness of its masculine and feminine body, overgrown with green life. Beneath these colours is the purple dreamscapes from which this golem originates, the connection to the sublime I have used in my work from the beginning. I have always envisioned that it is through dreams that this golem travels, and where it waits to complete its next tasks, should it be called upon. 

Golems are created to fulfill a task. That is their purpose. But what could my strange, bungling golem do other than be an artwork, a tribute to the golems of old folktales? In October of that year, I understood.  

Since late 2023, my sense of polycrisis no longer feels just digitally omnipresent. The world oriented itself into dangerously dogmatic camps, reinforced by algorithmically-generated walls. The ability to cope, let alone be helpful, has been overwhelmed, and I sought to make something — something active — that can do what I cannot in such a feeling of futility and paralysis. My Golem returned to me, asking to help, and I realised we are connected.

Unlike the fallible me, my Golem/Self navigates our digitally discordant world with blissful ignorance, and generous conviction. In its full tragicomic existence, my Golem/Self simply embodies my desire to be a helper or a protector, often thinking of ways to execute its task through naïve brilliance and unwavering, albeit fatigued, determination. It gets chewed up, spit out, thrown around, set aflame, and dunked in water. It gets things right and wrong and fumbles and falls, and yet it has inhuman patience and will always keep trying. That is its purpose: to embody the best of me and be there to remind me of the bittersweet beauty of human flaws and encourage me to keep on going.

My Golem/Self is a guardian and a custodian, not because it is especially good at anything, but because it is especially good at being there. For me. For you. For us. In the end, when all else fails, it is being there that serves as the greatest protection from despair. In bifurcating myself into Me and my Golem, I don’t feel alone, so I share my Golem/Self who just wants to help no matter who you are. And as I chronicle its misadventures across all the mediums and scenarios and dreams in which it finds itself, maybe, just maybe, next to this humanoid, we can start to see each other’s shared humanity again.