Deganit Stern Schocken: How Many Is One

The Middle East conflict plays a significant role in DeganitStern Schocken’s creative work, Over and again she calls for peaceful cooperation and dialogue at eye level – like, for example, when she set drinks cans found at the border area with diamonds or used vocabulary cards for Palestinian children to symbolically express how simple communication can fundamentally be.

The book’s title, How Many Is One, poses the question significant to all design disciplines as to how much of the universal resides in the individual and how much of the individual is anchored in the collective – yet it concerns a language seeking a form to articulate ideas. The book is made up of four chapters, each of which is named after a word from the title, referring to a particular artistic aspect of her work.

‘HOW’ focuses on the planning of the works on the page, in which the functional elements of the jewellery become the aesthetic subject. Each object stands in its own right, functioning conceptually, implicitly and metaphorically as a part of a system, and focuses on the body, movement and space.

‘MANY’ addresses individuation. The chapter provides a comprehensive picture of casting jewellery while relating at the same time to excess and error as fertile and intrinsic sources in the object’s process of creation and exploring the interaction of craft and industry in jewellery making.

‘IS’ examines the concept of value in jewellery production – in terms of the materials, sematic field and ethical status of the objects.

‘ONE’ presents form as the result of a process of dialogue, confrontation, tension, conflict and contradiction within the socio-political reality of Israel: the inexhaustible interplay of dichotomous forces, the many in one, the one in many.

Besides nearly 400 illustrations, the monograph comprises several texts by renowned authors. It is a portrait of an actively vocal artist – and an important document on the possibilities of using contemporary art jewellery to take a stand against socio-political issues.