Rebecka, 2022, Glass, Polish pavment stone Rebecka, 2022, Glass
Untitled (Carrier I - IV), 2020-2022, Glass, wood, fossils, begonia plant, soil
A hexagonal pavement stone sits on top of a sandblasted rose-coloured glass socle, the material body of the glass blown so as to follow the contour of the rugged, heavy stone. Another glass plinth stands in the ensemble as if waiting to bear the weight of the stone.
With these two works, both titled Rebecka, Susanna Jablonski traces a line through time and space back to their ancestry. In Hebrew, the name Rebecka means to tie, or to bind, and here the two materials, the fragile support and the heavy stone, are bound together. The stone is taken from the streets of Piotrków, a mid-sized city in central Poland, where Jablonski’s family lived before the Holocaust. The Piotrków ghetto was the first ghetto established by Nazi Germany in Poland, immediately after the occupation of the country in the autumn of 1939. In Jablonski’s installation the street stone is now surrounded by kindred objects bearing witness to time and history: fossils, a frail piece of wood and a begonia plant.