Sculpting wax & immortalizing the ephemeral
There is much delicacy in both the work and personality of Mona Oren. A talented visual artist, Mona sculpts wax. While some use wax as an intermediary step to later cast pieces in bronze, for Mona, the final artwork remains in wax itself. is made of wax. White, black, or transparent, etched by the reflections of light, her sculptures are filled with great poetry.
Sculpting wax & questioning time...
One wonders if the beeswax tulips she shapes into bouquets will withstand time and heat... They seem fragile but are ultimately far more eternal than real ones. Thanks to years of research and working with the material, Mona has tamed wax and discovered a unique, personal process—one she alone will keep secret—to stabilize the material. Time will change the appearance of these living works, which will develop a patina, but they will endure.
Through her choice of material, Mona Oren questions time. This medium, at the crossroads of the ephemeral and the enduring, both freezes and melts. It is this exploration of the in-between that gives her creations their beauty.
From wax to salt, letting nature sculpt...
In 2002, Mona Oren, of Israeli origin, performed an act by floating wax flowers on the Dead Sea. Salt, much like wax, preserves and freezes in time but also melts and disappears. It too allows itself to be metamorphosed, shaped by the whims of nature.
Many years later, in 2020, she decided to submerge these "fields of salt flowers" in the salty waters of the Dead Sea, as if to further deepen her reflection on the effects of time and nature. Salt will deposit, accumulate on these flowers, transforming them into organic forms covered in crystals, until they are no longer visible, eventually becoming fossils. This marks an additional step in the artist’s work, definitively inviting a new contemplation of nature.
