HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL RESOURCE AND EDUCATION

CENTER OF FLORIDA

851 North Maitland Avenue, Maitland, Florida 32751

407-628-0555 Fax: 407-628-1079

DAISY BRAND’S CERAMIC IMAGES OF A FRIGHTENING PAST

The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida, 851 North Maitland Avenue, Maitland, is pleased to announce the opening on November 4 of the exhibition Ceramic Images of a Frightening Past by Daisy Brand. The exhibition will remain until January 8, 2007

Daisy Brand, a survivor of the Holocaust, was born 1929 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. In 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz and from there was transported to Riga for slave labor. Other camps followed until liberation. She now lives in the Boston area, having immigrated to the USA in 1966. She was educated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Boston University. She has exhibited her ceramic work frequently in New England , Canada and Europe, including France, Italy and England. In 1955, Brand was part of a large exhibition curated by Monice Bohn-Duchen in London titled “After Auschwitzâ€?

Brand is an artist who challenges Theodore Adorno’s notion to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Brand, trained as a ceramic artist and potter, translates her memories into art.

In looking at her work, one is struck by the fact that she is working in clay. Her works contain images and symbols of the shattered Jewish life of her family and her people: scrolls of clay that look like paper, surrealistic painted images that appear as almost empty spaces of streets and rooms without human forma, recalling the “voidsâ€? of Daniel Libeskind’s architectonic spaces at the Berlin Jewish Museum. A storyteller, her ceramics help the viewer understand Brand’s own process of healing.

The artist has stated, �The material I work with, namely porcelain, as well as other clays, undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis from soft, smooth, almost sensual, to hard and resilient. To bring about this metamorphosis, the clay has to go through intense heat, radiating an orange glow from the cracks of the kiln, not unlike the crematoria in the night sky of Auschwitz. In my uses of colours I allude to this analogy. The process of clay work is as old as civilization itself. Somehow the fascination for me is that fire in this case creates, rather than destroys, which I hope to apply to my life as well�.

Dr. Stephen Feinstein, Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota states, “Brand’s work provides us with some important confirmations. First, clay as a medium can be used to express pure aesthetic and can also be used in storytelling. Secondly, the storytelling, in Brand’s case, in not linear narrative and one piece of ceramic sculpture does not depend on the one that preceded it or the one that follows. They are fragments of memory in themselves, reflective of a shattered world, the memory of which has now been put back together in a way by the potter’s handâ€?.