Scholar’s Rock, 2025. Stoneware, earthenware, glazes. 50 × 60 × 35 cm. Photo: Noa Chernichovsky.

For the Jerusalem-born artist, every crack in a sidewalk, every layer of peeling paint, every shadow cast on concrete is an invitation — and clay is how she answers it

TEL AVIV — Noa Chernichovsky does not collect shells or stones on her walks. Textures are what she gathers. Asphalt stains that survive the rain, layers of peeling paint on walls, the unlikely meeting between a rusted gate and a construction site: all of it becomes raw material for ceramic sculptures that challenge how we perceive the everyday. Born in Jerusalem in 1990, the Israeli artist now splits her time between Tel Aviv and London, and her work travels through museums and art fairs across Europe, the United Kingdom, and Israel, establishing a singular voice in the contemporary ceramics landscape.

Selected as one of five finalists for the Brookfield Properties Craft Award at Collect 2023, the leading craft and design fair in the United Kingdom, held at Somerset House in London, Chernichovsky received the recognition that critics and curators had long been anticipating: the artist had found a language of her own, hybrid and rigorous, capable of moving between the sculptural and the decorative, between tradition and material experimentation. That same year, her pieces were featured at Salon Art & Design in New York, represented by the London gallery Charles Burnand, with whom she has maintained a partnership since 2022.

Education Between Jerusalem, Bornholm, and London

The mobility that defines her worldview is equally embedded in her academic path. Graduating with honors in Ceramics and Glass from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (2016), where she received the Blumenthal Prize for Excellence, she spent an exchange period in 2014 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Bornholm, Denmark. Several years later, in 2021, she enrolled in the master’s program at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, one of the most prestigious postgraduate schools of art and design in the world, completing her MA in Ceramics and Glass in 2022 with the support of the Clore-Bezalel Scholarship.

Her time at the RCA was formative. During those years in London, Chernichovsky deepened her inquiry into the expansive possibilities of ceramics as an artistic language, moving toward a sculptural practice that does not separate form, material, and concept. The master’s dissertation, developed in dialogue with the History of Design program at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), explored connections between historical collections and contemporary production in glass and ceramics. In 2022, she was also selected as a finalist for the Global Design Graduate Show, in collaboration with Gucci.

Walks as Method, Clay as Archive

With near-scientific precision, the artist describes her creative process: everything begins with walking. During her daily movements through the city, Chernichovsky photographs fragments of the urban environment that catch her eye. An unusual combination of colors on a sidewalk, the porous texture of a deteriorating wall, the layering of shadows across concrete surfaces. These images form a personal visual archive, a sensory database she brings back to the atelier and translates into ceramic form.

Pink Accumulation series, 2023. Earthenware, slips, glazes. 105 × 46 × 10 cm / 46 × 50 × 8 cm / 48 × 52 × 7.5
cm. Photo: Graham Pearson

In her own words, working in the studio resembles assembling a puzzle. Chernichovsky commands a range of traditional techniques, including slab building, hand building, and pressing clay slabs into plaster molds. Each piece is made as an individual element before being incorporated into a larger composition, in a process she compares to building a collage. Readymade objects and mixed materials enter the equation, folding into the ceramic process organically.

What emerges are hybrid compositions the artist calls multilayered sculptures: visual structures that bring together elements from different cultural and material contexts into a single, complex, and imaginative identity. Chernichovsky describes herself as a “sampler” of surfaces and forms drawn from the physical environment, a term that evokes the vocabulary of electronic music and graphic design alike, deliberately expanding the references of ceramic language.

International Exhibitions and Institutional Recognition

A growing and consistent presence in contemporary art and design circuits defines Chernichovsky’s exhibition record. Her works are held in private collections and have been shown at leading institutions, including the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza (MIC) in Italy, where she participated in the 62nd Premio Faenza Biennale in 2023; the Wilfrid Israel Museum of Asian Art in Israel; and the Jerusalem Natural History Museum.

Cauliflower Bollards 1, 2, 3, 2022. Earthenware, glazes. 62 × 25 × 25 cm / 89 × 25 × 25 cm / 62 × 25 × 25 cm.
Photo: Graham Pearson

In 2025, her work reached a broader international stage. She took part in the International Biennale of Artistic Ceramics of Aveiro in Portugal, one of the most important global platforms dedicated to contemporary ceramics. That same year, she joined the group exhibition Spaceshifting, curated by Louise Chappelle for the summer show of the Royal Society of Sculptors at the Royal Over-Seas League in London, an institution of which she is a member. She also presented her solo exhibition Reblend at Beit Binyamin, the Israeli Ceramic Center in Tel Aviv, curated by Reut Raviah and Shelly Shavit.

By 2026, her works were presented at the BFAMI Annual Gala Presentation at Phillips, one of the world’s leading contemporary art auction houses, in London. Participation in events of this nature signals that Chernichovsky’s work has already moved beyond the specialized ceramics circuit, entering the broader contemporary art market with considerable force.

From Education to Writing: Other Dimensions of a Multifaceted Practice

Education has been a constant thread throughout Chernichovsky’s career. Founded by her in 2017, Ceramic in Frishman quickly became one of the most dynamic centers for ceramic education in Israel. Leading a team of 15 educators and technical staff, she transformed the space into a hub of contemporary practice, offering workshops, multilevel courses, guest artist programs, children’s activities, and community initiatives. Over the years, the studio welcomed hundreds of students and thousands of visitors from across the country, remaining active until 2025.

Banana Trees 1, 2022. Earthenware, glazes. 72 × 50 × 50 cm. Photo: Graham Pearson.

Alongside her artistic practice, Chernichovsky has built a career as a writer and critic. As a member of the editorial board of Textura Magazine for Material Culture, a publication supported by Beit Binyamini, the Israeli Ceramic Center, she contributes essays of wide critical range, covering retrospectives of international artists such as American artist Theaster Gates, exhibitions of Israeli creators including Ziona Shimshi and Irit Hamo, and analyses of collections at European museums including the V&A in London.

Invitations to lecture at prestigious institutions round out this multifaceted profile. In 2022, she taught a workshop at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, United Kingdom. Three years later, she was invited to give a talk at the Bezalel Academy, where she had studied, and an artist talk at Mazel Dagim Gallery in Jaffa, on the occasion of the group exhibition Bulbs, developed in collaboration with artist Meydad Eliyahu.

A Ceramics That Absorbs the World

At the center of Noa Chernichovsky’s poetics lies a conviction: ceramics does not need to be ornamental or utilitarian to be relevant. As an instrument for reading the world, it can reveal what the hurried eye misses. By transforming fragments of the urban landscape into multilayered sculptural compositions, the artist argues that the everyday, with its chaotic accumulation of textures, materials, and histories, holds a visual richness that rarely gets the attention it deserves.

Press coverage has followed this trajectory with growing interest. In 2022, the British edition of the Financial Times highlighted her work in a feature on artisans who explore the beauty in imperfection, and Ceramic Now Magazine published an extensive profile of the artist. More recently, in August 2025, Portfolio Magazine, a leading Israeli publication, brought her back to its pages in a prominent feature.

Mineral Accumulation, 2023. Charles Burnand Gallery, London. Photo: Graham Pearson.

Open to collaborations with galleries and drawn to international residencies, Chernichovsky continues pushing the boundaries of ceramic language. Her work can be followed through her official website at www.noachernichovsky.com. For Arch Gallery & Design, her trajectory illustrates with clarity what is most compelling in contemporary ceramics today: when clay refuses to be merely clay and begins to carry, on its surface, the weight and beauty of the world around it.

arch gallery & design | archgallerydesign.art.br | ISSN 3086-4267