Healing through Impermanence – Nomi Tannhauser
- nonaorbach
- Feb 12
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 19
Plasticine as a means of dealing with life’s passages
My journey with plasticine began when I was teaching the art of color mixing to my college students. I wanted the students to literally feel the relations between the quantities of color required for mixing each shade, with their hands rather than with the end of a paintbrush or with a spatula. I came across a booklet of art techniques published by the Youth Wing of the Israel Museum * with a description of smearing plasticine on board and decided to use this method to teach color mixing. Each student was to use only the three primary colors and try to reach the color palette of a painting by a renowned artist. After accomplishing this they were asked to copy the work itself. The results were invariably amazing: no matter the student's level, the work was stunning, resembling the richness and impasto of an oil painting. But unlike oil painting this simple and easy medium was accessible to anyone with fingers and a piece of board. I envied the students for this satisfying experience.
A few years later as I was working on an exhibit of my own, I decided to allow myself to use plasticine myself. My topic of observation was school girls in uniforms in the streets of Jerusalem. The girls came from two seemingly opposite societies – the Palestinian one and the Jewish Ultra-Orthodox group – but to me both groups resembled each other. Both wore uniforms with a light blue shirt and a dark blue skirt or pinafore, and they generally looked alike. Only insiders could tell them apart by s minute nuances.
In my work I took them out of the city streets and placed them in open wheat fields. As I worked on this series for a long time, I felt the need for a break from the serious and demanding oil painting in favor of a more playful medium. I went ahead and used the plasticine exercise I had given my students to portray the girls with.
This was my first attempt at working with this plasticine. Looking back, it was no coincidence that I used a “childish” and playful medium while painting young girls. The girls symbolized for me the constraints of society and reminded me of my fears and barriers as an immigrant child in Israel. Just as I wanted to set the girls free in my painting by placing them in a natural environment, I wanted to free myself by working with a soft and tactile technique that connected to the child I was prior to the my arrival here. Working in this medium also released my need for perfection as I did not have much control over it.
The imperfect nature of the plasticine came to my aid again when painting myself a few years later. After many years of painting girls and women from orthodox and covered societies I decided to confront myself and paint my own exposed body. My fifty-year-old body was showing signs of age and I, who had never really felt comfortable in side it now felt even more so. Using plasticine as my medium I sat in front of the mirror and tried to reach the subtle color of my skin and the shades in the folds of my body. The imperfections I was seeing merged with the imperfect nature of the plasticine and kneading this soft and oily medium corresponded with the texture of my body. The understanding that just as plasticine responds to changes of the surrounding and is ultimately transient so am I and so is my body, enabled me to accept myself and the changes I was going through more easily.
Buddhist meditation has been a central part of my life for many years. Buddhist philosophy places great importance on the awareness of impermanence. According to this view much of our suffering arises from the need to hold on to different aspects of our life while things are invariably changing and decaying and not in our control. Therefore, accepting change is a central theme in my life and has been an important part of my daily practice.
My work with plasticine also carries such a sentiment. Oftentimes, I have been asked whether I protect my plasticine works with a medium and whether I worry about their short longevity. My answer is that this short-lived nature of the plasticine is precisely what frees me from the heavyweight notion that my oeuvre will live on forever. Therefore, my work with plasticine acts for me as a Memento Mori, a daily reminder of my transient nature.
I often travel abroad to take part in a Meditation course in India. As a person coming from the West, the basic conditions in these centers resonates the Buddhist emphasis on the virtue of renunciation. In a series of works depicting a center in north India I used this basic technique to attribute a deep sense of spirituality even to a toilet room or to laundry hanging in a courtyard.
In reaction to the October 7th attack on Israel I produced two works, both in plasticine: “The incoming Breath, The Outgoing breath” was made during the 3 months after the attack, a time I of extreme anxiety. My way to calm myself down was to focus on my breathing. This piece depicts my effort to remain sane during these dramatic times, and I also serves as a reminder to others to use breathing as a way of staying balanced.
In the piece “Family on Zoom with Son who was Suddenly Drafted” I tried to deal with my anxiety over my son who was drafted from one day to the next. A snapshot taken by a family friend captured our family’s three generations looking at the phone while my son, with whom we are talking to was invisible to the spectators. The work with plasticine once again enabled me to process this extreme moment with my fingers. Touching and smearing this versatile medium enabled me to regain control over the situation as well as see life’s challenges in a different perspective and connect to my son in spite of the distance and the threatening situation.
Thus, during my life as woman and artist, this simple, joyful and colorful medium has softened my inner knots and helped me go through life’s passages more easily and smoothly.
Nomi Tannhauser:
*The Israel Museum Youth Wing / Anat Eshed
ירושלים : מוזיאון ישראל, אגף הנוער ע"ש רות: תשנ"ו 1996: מהד' ב
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