Ruth Schreiber

I am an artist whose work explores aspects of being female in contemporary society. My subjects include family and relationships, ceremony and ritual, memory and death. My art often focuses on the female body with all its changes during pregnancy and motherhood, and the various stages of aging and entropy. I am interested in the surface of the human envelope, the failings of its structures as it ages, and our attempts to minimise these failings.

I also like to explore traditional texts, especially the Bible, in new ways, and to shine a light on family material from the Holocaust.

I studied art at a variety of institutions in London, N. California and Jerusalem. My oeuvre is very varied as I work in a wide variety of media: painting, ceramics and sculpture, video art and photography, print-making and installation pieces.

My art can be found in private collections on three continents, and in the Ben Uri Gallery (The London Jewish Museum of Art) UK, and in Israel, in the Jerusalem Print Workshop, the Ein Harod Museum of Art and Yad Vashem Museum collections.

I work from my studio in Jerusalem, Israel.

As a young woman in northern California during the 1970s I joined a consciousness-raising group. This was at the height of the feminist revolution, “Our Bodies Ourselves” had just been published for the first time, and the prevailing zeitgeist had a deep and lasting influence on me. I was particularly fascinated by the conflicting prevailing attitudes not only to child rearing and division of labor between parents, but especially to childbirth and nursing. I subsequently helped establish similar groups for other women.

Since working as an artist, I find that these debates still resonate with me and I am drawn to exploring life cycle issues- topics which relate closely to my roles as a daughter and sister, wife and mother, mother-in-law and now grandmother too: birth, fertility, family, identity, memory, heritage, death and the related subjects of the body, health, beauty and aging. I and my contemporaries find ourselves as the sandwich generation, trying to balance responsibilities to aging parents and to our children and grandchildren.

In parallel I like to explore women’s positions in the Bible and during the Holocaust.