Naama Bergman

Naama Bergman’s Salt Brooch 06 appears at first like a mineral specimen plucked from the earth, yet it is a carefully constructed artifact that speaks with quiet urgency about fragility, transformation, and time. The brooch’s form is soft-edged and organic, its surface encrusted with clusters of crystallized salt that shimmer with an icy luminescence. These tiny cubic deposits suggest growth but also decay. The piece calling to mind coral, frost, or ancient relics unearthed after long burial.

The formal tension between materials is key to Bergman’s aesthetic. The salt crystals emerge from a delicate structure of iron wire, a choice that sets up a poetic opposition between permanence and impermanence, the natural and the man-made. As salt continues to grow and potentially destabilize the very mesh it rests on, the work becomes a living artifact becoming a study in entropy. It embodies the paradox of preservation through decay, drawing viewers in with its glimmering beauty even as it invites meditation on loss and transformation.

Symbolically, the brooch evokes memory, rootedness, and the passing of time. It may be worn close to the body, but its language is one of distance and erosion. Bergman allows us to consider the power of adornment not just to decorate, but to witness as a way to bear silent testimony to the forces that shape us.