Just before I started writing this article, my partner and I lit a four-wick candle. Between prayers, we tasted wine, smelled fragrant cloves, and inspected our fingernails by candlelight. We were celebrating havdallahthe brief Jewish ritual that separates the end of Shabbatour holy day of rest, along with the rest of the week.
Much of the Jewish religion celebrates the beauty of transitions: between sacred and profane, between pure and impure, between one state of being and the next. As Havdallah, these transitions are often marked by ceremonies imbued with materiality: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching things we find beautiful.
One of our most powerful transition sites is a ritual bath called the mikveh. Converts submerge completely under the life-giving water and emerge as Jews. Orthodox women cleanse their bodies at the end of their menstrual cycle. Many immerse themselves in water to mark other transitions: graduations, b’nai mitzvahs and recovery from a long illness. Today, some trans Jews visit the mikveh as a way to mark the transition to a new, different incarnation of the gender.
By molding the clay that lines these ritual baths, the trans and Jewish artist nicki green seeks to draw our attention and investigation to the mikveh. What is this object? How, why and by whom is it made? Who are the people who use it, how does their body interact with it, and what is the nature of the transition they experience beneath the surface of its waters? Where does his power ultimately come from?
Like many Jews, Green grew up surrounded by an abundance of objects that are central to Jewish life: spice boxes, kiddush cups, seder plates, candlesticks, kippot and the myriad of other objects that the one finds lining dining room cabinets and spilling over into Judaica stores. Green remembers his family Hanukkah (Hanukkah menorah) in particular. “There was something about his presence in the house and the way he reappeared every year that held all that energy, even just on our kitchen table or in the window, that felt meaningful. It is the power of an object, the meaning or the energy of the object.
Green’s clay sculptures do not themselves function as ritual objects. Rather, they embody another key aspect of Jewish practice: they are commentaries. They challenge us to think about the limits and potentials of the objects we use in religious and spiritual practice. Green’s sculpture “The Porous Sea” (Tub) (2019) is too small a pool for most people to dive into, but it still contains a complex and powerful spirituality. The beauty of the transition is clear: it’s only when we crane our necks to look over the raw, unfinished exterior that we can see the sparkling, richly decorated interior. A rippling surface suggests water, causing the paintings of hands, heads, and other ornamental designs to wrinkle, ripple, morph, and ripple.
Removing functionality from a ritual object allows Green to experiment with form, hypothesizing what might be possible in a ritual bath. “Mikvah for mycoltheology” (2018) is a basin broken in two, placed on the ground, and cut into slices. Like ‘The Porous Sea’, we look within to see a dazzling artwork in rough skin: a female figure picking up mushrooms, overlapping in transitional stages, perhaps replicating the life cycle of mushrooms herself .
Clay is intimately linked to our body: first packed with earth, it forms the plates that hold our food and lines the showers that cleanse our skin. Working with clay – hammering, cutting, throwing, shaping – involves intimate contact with human hands.
“Because clay particles are so small and tightly packed, they receive our fingerprints and our body shape in a very direct way and almost become an archive of touch,” Green said. Hyperallergic in an interview.
Like the waters of the mikveh, the fires of the oven fuse a painted surface with the molded clay body. Green observes that traditionally, shaping the form of a clay work was a male work, while the decoration of its surface was a female work. “Is the cooking process some kind of strange medium? Is it a trans environment, where the masculine construction of a form and the feminine decoration of the surface become somehow liquid, unified or complicated? asked the artist.
While her work inherently challenges these traditional gender roles in craftsmanship, Green also delves into the assumed femininity of dense ornament painting. Much of this ornament itself refers to the process of transition: the alchemical mandala, the genderless mushroom, the superimposed figures in different stages of being.
The malleability of clay makes it a perfect material for studying bodies in states of change. It was only in the last year that Green delved into creating human forms, marking a transition for the artist herself. In Fountain Eye, Thick and Fruitful Vine Knot (2022), she features three figures participating in the ritual of the mikvah, their rough skin and raw edges providing a contrast to the tight precision of the tiles of the mikvah. These participants are shown at several transitional stages, including sprouting from a mushroom mound.
For Green, the link between the mikveh and homosexuality is clear. “Beneath the surface of the water is liminal space,” she says quietly in voiceover for the video project Blessing for fermentation (2017), as a figure enters a turquoise, flickering pool. “Matter transforms here, and as queers, we know this in-between place. We are liminal people,” she continues.
Talk to HyperallergicGreen adds that she views the act of washing as a “queer transformation ritual that could be considered trans in and of itself.”
But not all Jews share this perspective. Many mikvahs are not welcoming to trans and non-binary Jews. The mikvahs are not always a liberating space for cis women either: a monthly visit to the mikvah can be an obligation for Orthodox women to be considered clean by the men of their community. The notion of a mikveh that affirms the beauty of all bodies and all transitions on their own terms is in many ways a more recent phenomenon. As we continue to explore this possibility, the questions and comments embedded in Green’s work help point the way.
