On an autumn Sabbath (Saturday) morning I arrived at the home of Daniel Davis and his wife, Adina Bar-On, an international performance artist. Also invited were Etty Goren and Raya Stern, close friends of Daniel, and ceramicists themselves. We sat around his bed and Raya opened our conversation with the following sentence to describe his work and in this summary also described with great accuracy his personality: “There’s lots of mud from the centrifugal motion of the wheel, and Danny is stable amidst this chaos.” Daniel was lying down, because he had difficulty keeping himself sturdy when sitting up for a long time. Over four years ago, a virulent brain cancer had been diagnosed and, since then, in stages, he’d lost his ability to speak and his other motor skills. Nonetheless, from his lying position, his presence, his vital awareness of our conversation was felt. He reacted with his eyes, nods of his head, or excited murmurs, or even short, single words — “yes” and “no” — that he could still utter; he had his own way of saying things decisively, albeit curtly. Thus, even with his illness, Daniel Davis was still quite stable.

I met Adina and Danny more than twenty years ago, soon after they won the prize for the completion of a work on the video “A Woman of the Pots” (1990) displayed in the exhibition of award winners at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The video work was a development of the performance, by the same name, which Bar-On had previously performed at the Israel Museum. The pots and vessels that Danny created for the performance and the movie were of major significance; they functioned as resonant spaces for Bar-On’s voice and were in themselves components of the performance`s content in the sound that emanated from them, the movement they allowed, and the landscape they created with their presence.

Daniel’s collaborations with Bar-On were numerous but these were not the only ones; throughout his creative years he also worked with other artists and creators. At the start of the 1990s, Moshe Gershuni was a frequent visitor at Daniel`s studio. The conversations that took place, in the process of mutual fertilization, produced a collection of 20 pots. By the end of the 1990s, Daniel began to create Judaica paper-cuttings, together with Richard Flantz, his wife Nitza, and Shoshi Foyerlicht, and the “DFFF Group” (Davis, Flantz, Flantz, Foyerlicht) was established. The group was engaged, for about three years, in creating new works, in the tradition of the Jewish paper cuts. Their works were exhibited at Jewish centers in the United States and at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem where an exhibition of contemporary Judaica was held.

These collaborations attest to Daniel’s way of working out of a dialogue, which was sometimes very intense and often one that also created controversy. However, they expressed Daniel’s harsh critique that he used to voice around a table, set with his own dinnerware, about the narcissistic tendencies of artists and their need for exclusivity. For Daniel, the clay and ceramics had conductive qualities of unification and connection, even in times of controversy, and this feature is well evident in all modes of his work. But it seems that his strict attitude towards artists and his ambivalent attitude towards being an artist himself must have influenced his choice not to exhibit at all; though his work`s place in the local history of ceramic making is so important the fact remains that many are unfamiliar with his work which awaits exposure.

All the while in the background, on the laptop screen, a sequence of slides from his works alternated, and Adina brought out albums featuring photos of Danny working in his studio and albums with his collected writings from the past ten years. The alternating photos, albums and manuscripts swayed our conversation to different places and times; this associativity was very appropriate to the way Daniel worked and the manner he thought. It also testified to the many transitions in his family’s life between Jerusalem, Ramat ha-Sharon, Kiron, and Metula, years in which the couple had two children, Shahar and Yasmin, until their home was established on Merkas Ba-alei Melacha Street, Tel Aviv in the late 1980s. These fluctuations are evident in the subjects of his works, in their materiality, in the images and the inscriptions that appear on them. “Daniel put the landscape in his pottery and created his own clay by a personal recipe” Eti told me and thus explained that his attitude to the landscape that surrounds him was not limited to the content he cast in his works, but existed in his material, which he would turn into and mix in the elements of the landscape in which he lived – algae, seawater, sand, tree cuttings, nails, shells, bones, remains of nature and of man.

The mixing of these materials together, within each other, associated to other forms of connections in Daniel`s work. The iron connectors, seen in some of the pottery, as if repairing intentional cracks or indentations related to time and its damages. Both the cracks and their connectors together with the inscriptions that appear on the pots, such as: “Rāshiyah al-Fuhār,” and repeated on an entire series of jugs from 1982-1983, refer to a Lebanese potters’ village that was destroyed during the War of Attrition; or the words “Tel Aviv” and “Gaza” on a later series – all of these thicken the historic dimension which is also connected to the local narrative of the area in its struggle to seeks its ways to unification (Daniel had learned the craft of pottery and the bearing of pots in Gaza). Also the pots, bowls, plates and cups – on many of which appear paintings of elves, devils or alternatively inscriptions, like: “Elohim, are you God?” – stimulated those who dined to have lively conversations; being arranged on the table in preparation for the meal, these table pieces invited the expression of thoughts, emotions and disagreements into that space, while simultaneously connected and united the diverse people and characters.

In the act of connecting, Daniel expressed his wish to undermine each seemingly arbitrary phenomenon, and attempted to instill significance. Moreover, the symmetrical and harmonious format of the paper-cuttings, that he began to create at the end of the 1990s, may also be encountered in his writing. Despite their stormy content that reflects harsh emotional situations, the sentences have a uniform and balanced structure of argument and counter-argument that follows as an echo. Looking back at the pots that were built mostly from a shape that opens and a shape that closes, one can see how much this structure is a recurring feature of Daniel’s way of thinking and the way he worked.

Order and organization continued to exist even when Daniel could no longer create independently. During the first two years of his illness, with the help of his dedicated caregiver, Daniel ‘handled’ and set order to the casual materials in his immediate surroundings; leaves, stems, bricks, broken dishes, and other ordinary objects in the house and yard took on a new form and from obscurity transformed to meaningful, thought-provoking observation. Thus, the pile of lemon peels that Daniel had left to dry and then painted; and having been emptied by him of their fruit contents, became small bowls that perhaps were waiting for some other use or perhaps for decorating only.

Even in the last few years, when Daniel Davis and Adina Bar-On moved from one apartment to another, allowing easy movement with a wheelchair, their home was full of his works – pottery from all sorts of periods were arranged side by side by the walls, table and shelf. Most of them had a raw appearance, sometimes orphaned or purposeless – intentional qualities in Daniel’s work – although the shapes that grow in a cone about 60 cm high give them other values ​​of beauty and eternity.

On the walls there hung Judaica works from later years. These were paper cuts made to the smallest detail. In their delicacy and maximum precision invested in them they revealed a different face in his work. Most of the cuts were made as a kind of spectacular and colorful substrate of a pattern – a pattern of letters or a pattern of leaves – that has a lot of decorative value.
Turning to the use of the word and researching its origins happened due to external causes when it became necessary to clear out the studio in which he’d worked. That marked the moment when he actually stopped creating ceramic pieces, never touching clay again. The connection between Danny and his studio was so total that he couldn’t replace one studio with another, and he preferred – in his extreme fashion – to turn to new materials and other creative techniques. It seems that his transition to the word and paper-cutting not only preserved the subject-matter of his clay pieces, but even refined and empowered it; moreover, it exalted their values from the concrete to the spiritual.

“I want to write about a place where I am a sculptor, and I eliminated all the possibilities to eliminate sculptures … I want to write about the place where my creation, at the moment that it is illuminated disappears and the moment it is forgotten it becomes visible.
I want to write about a place where being is not being and not being is being.
I want to be nonexistent.
I want to be standing when I sit, and to sit when I am seated.
I want to feel good for no reason, and not be depressed. That is learning.
How can I write about something that I do not see but exists, and how can I not write about something that does not exist but I can see”

Daniel Davis 2000 – 2005