Zemer Peled's work examines the beauty and brutality of the natural world. Her sculptural language is formed by her surrounding environment and landscapes, and engages with themes of memories, identity, and place. The association of porcelain with grace, refinement, and civilization is turned on itself when we are confronted with this material in another state. When a porcelain form is broken down into shards, the brutality of its jagged edges is juxtaposed with its insistent fragility. The material becomes both violent and beautiful, hard yet breakable. When seen in the organic formations of Peled’s structures, a whole from the shards is recreated, this time estranged from its original context of neatness, tradition, and cultivation, but nonetheless unified by an overall cohesiveness of movement and composition.
Her sculptures and installations consist of thousands of hand-crafted porcelain shards: a technique that yields a texture both delicate and severe. In some works, large-scale ceramic pieces appear airy, delicate, and fluffy, as if one's breath might break it. In others, Peled's fragments are geometric barbs that mysteriously take on an alluring form: offering a sense of softness despite a sharp actuality.