World Fairytales: A Saturday of Stories and Clay

Nearly forty people came to YEDI on Saturday, 17 October for the first half of World Fairytales. The plan was stories, then clay. What happened in between was the best kind of argument about what stories are actually for.

The day opened with Professor Anna Shternshis, who holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto and directs the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Anna moved through Jewish folktales from different centuries and different parts of the world. Rather than lecturing at the room, she worked with it: drawing out the threads between stories, asking what people recognised, and tracing where tales had travelled and what they had picked up along the way.

Then Tanya Besedina put clay in everyone’s hands, and the room got loud.

Tanya taught the whole time, showing how simple tools and repurposed household objects print texture into wet clay. Almost nothing on the tables needed buying, which is deliberate: anyone who wanted to keep going at home could. People sketched first, then built. A hamsa with eyes opening across its fingers. Creatures with wings and tails. Faces surfacing out of pressed texture. Several participants worked leaves and sprigs of thyme into the surface, so the clay took an impression of something living.

Three participants with low vision worked alongside everyone else at the same tables. Clay is read with the hands, which is a good part of why we chose it.

Then the part nobody expected. Each finished piece was carried to a lightbox in the back room, photographed, and appeared on the projected wall within moments, while its maker was still in the room. Watching people find their own work already up on the wall was the best thing that happened all day.

On 7 November those pieces will be projected into our exhibition at SOL Multicultural Music Festival, alongside Tanya’s seven large terracotta reliefs.

Thank you to everyone who came, to Anna for an absorbing hour, and to YEDI for the space.

See you on 7 November.