Hardboiled egg / Ha'Kibbutz gallery

Hardboiled Egg

The swallow builds its nest from mud and straw. Like it, Rani Sasson has created nests – many, very large cocoons. In this past year, utilizing her whole body, Sasoon has packed earth and straw on to chicken wire and built complete, warm and tight, pear- or perhaps lung-shaped spheres. At the bottom of each she has purposely left a well-formed opening. 

In a previous body of work, Sasson created angular 'shells', torn and wounded, built on iron or aluminum netting. Through the net she threaded a sheet that appeared wet, soaked with a transparent milky colored material, appearing as if a liquid has seeped through the openings in the net, coagulating and hardening while in flow.  

A structure and its rupturing, life and death, merged into one unraveled form.  

In her current exhibition, 'Hardboiled Egg', the cocoon form stands out in its wholeness. The 'cocoons' will all be hung from the ceiling. Sasoon uses her own body for all the stages of the creation; her physical presence is one of her a fundamental principles. Some cocoons are transparent plastic casts. The transparent cocoons are hermetically sealed; the insides appearing to vibrate through the tight hard shells. This time, her sculptures display both their inner and outer surfaces; 'Boiled Egg'. A 'winged machine' is trapped inside one of them, and a second contains thin black thorns, like sketching lines, that finding a place collapsed into a soft pile. The 'winged machine' was also built by Sasson herself. She dismantled a machine engine and reassembled it with pieces of wood, weaving tree bark and iron netting to create the wings that vibrate in motion and knock against the hard, transparent, watery cocoon crust from the inside. Sasson smoothed the exterior of the shell and made the inside bumpy, which gives it a watery look and enhances the soft trembling effect of the knocking. It seems as if a swallow has nested here, and the knockings are the chick's wings, beating against each other as it attempts to take flight, with soft and deliberate clumsiness. One 'winged machine' has already escaped and is beating lightly, trying to adjust to the world outside, to the walls of the white niche that was built in the gallery.

The thorns that Sasson planted in the other 'cocoon' look like seeds that may scatter through the transparent, seemingly transient casting, and fulfill their artistic potential.