Silicone in the Crucible, Niva Bar-Shimon

That long, transparent thing with its metamorphic container manages to astonish, every time, again. A squeeze of the trigger producing a bond. The cartridge, unwilling, is forced toward an unknown fate.

Most often, it dances its drunken sway, spills out, loses form, builds slowly, then trickles and flows beyond control.

Within minutes, it steams with gleaming vapors, slides from here to there and back again, grips everything and releases nothing.

Or else, lets go all at once, failing to meet the unreasonable hope placed upon it: to fuse the unfusables, to defy the forces of gravity and natural dissolution.

A super-glue of bonding the impossible.

Without the gun, the cartridge stays rigid, stubborn, stiff, devoid of any special give. That dangerous heat, the one that melts it, at times turning it into a source of fear, is also what makes it wondrous.

Unlike its adhesive kin, it does not dry. It cools. Its dampness is an illusion, its wetness not truly wet.

Droplets gather on the surface as the glue gun waits. Each becomes a tiny sculpture, sometimes flat like a treasure of ancient coins fused together in the deep, sometimes rising in spiral mounds, monuments to a process born of a fleeting tether to an electric umbilical cord. Without that lifeline, no transformation, no existence.

Tangles of long-stretching, ever-sticking, ever-snaring threads, a sticky web spun from the byproduct, a bundle of sugar-spun, toxic candy floss.

Yoav can never bear them, those threads that refuse to break free, only stretching longer and longer from joinings that never asked for them. They frustrate him endlessly. The more he tries to pull away, the more they cling, adhere, persist.

Fine filaments vanish at a touch, melted by warmth or the press of a second glue mass, or fall to the floor or into the bin like shedding hair.

Now and then, a film forms, delicate and easily torn. With just a breath or a stray flick, it can billow into the suggestion of a ballooning idea. Such dizzying success, for a moment, Yoav becomes a powerful wizard. One of those rare, invisible moments that happen far from the only eye in the world that matters to him. Then the sheet folds in on itself as swiftly as it came, curling into a lump that denies the very idea it promised.

Sometimes the glue scorches the glued, boiling up bubbles, melting materials unfit to bear its heat. Scorch marks etch beneath the crystallizing layers or dissolve the bonded material entirely, leaving only crumbled traces, a fantasy of connection. 

Trying to glue again what once held, however imperfectly, only melts the bond that was, turning the hope for a stronger grip into annihilation anxiety.

Sometimes it is time itself that reminds what has been joined: You were once separate, remember?

Wood, metal, shell, stone, in a certain angle, in their own time, reclaim their solitude, slipping free and leaving behind cloudy, translucent marks, the residue of a distant memory of being one.

And then there is a moment when the glue becomes a substance in its own right, stretching, spiraling, challenging gravity, inviting touch, sculptable, luminous. Like all moments, it passes. And when it does, the truth sets, firm and clear: true magic cannot be recreated. What was, will not return.

Translated by Yaron Regev

Niva Bar-Shimon: tkwsniva@gmail.com