Bones

Transformation and Ritual

Bones, small animals in various stages of decay, fragments of plants—each gathered through wandering and foraging—become still life creations.
In a ritualistic act amidst the turmoil of war, artist Batya Gil Margalit places these found objects between sheets of glass and fires them in a kiln at approximately 800°C.
What emerges are not just sculptures, but relics—traces of both death and life, transformed and preserved.

Heat, Decay, and Preservation

The glass becomes a magnifying lens, revealing the heat-induced metamorphosis of what-was-once-alive but has not yet completely perished:
plants become ash or soot, aromatic herbs form bubbles, animal remains foam, teeth crumble, insects vanish leaving only a stain, reptiles leave ghostlike skeletons,
stones explode, and even discarded tin cans—archaeological signs of human presence—crack the glass.
The remains of the fired items are always less than what they were before.

Intervention in Nature

The artist’s action intervenes in the movement of matter in nature, interrupting nature’s slow process of decay. Outside, these objects would continue to disintegrate.
But inside the kiln, they undergo a kind of destruction on the way to preservation, “freezing” the passage of time while echoing long-term actions of natural forces
like heat and compression, which create geological and archaeological phenomena of decay and preservation.

Museums, Memory, and Glass

From childhood, Batya Gil Margalit was drawn to natural history museums—geology, archaeology, biology—all encased in glass showcases, telling the story of earth and humanity.
The showcases create a barrier between us, the viewers, and the exhibits, protecting the object from us and protecting us from the objects.
Her bone sculptures, too, are encased, but the glass clings tightly, skin-like, fusing with the specimen, imprisoning it and becoming part of its essence;
thus eliminating the museum barrier between the exhibit and the one observing it.

Time, Memory, and Survival

This body of work began a few months after October 7, 2023, a time when life itself seemed to freeze.
And yet, as these pieces suggest, life, like matter, continues to move—transformed, fragmented, but still present.