The first thing you notice in Rivka Hassan's studio is not the wheel. It's the light. An enormous skylight floods the room with the harsh, chalk-white noon of the Negev. By 14:00 Rivka has drawn the linen shades. "The sun does half my work," she says, "and then it tries to do the other half wrong."
A workshop carved from the desert
Rivka moved to Mitzpe Ramon in 2014, at 32, after a decade in Tel Aviv studios where, in her words, "nobody had time to make anything slowly." She bought the stone structure for the price of a small car.
"I didn't come to the desert to find inspiration. I came because I needed a place where the clay would dry at the speed it wanted to dry, not at the speed I wanted to work."— Rivka Hassan
The patience of fire
I ask her about the series title. "Iron and gold aren't opposites," she says, pouring tea. "They're just different speeds. Iron takes a million years to become what it is. Gold you can hammer thin in an afternoon. I wanted to put them next to each other and see what time looks like."
The salt glaze — her signature finish — requires her to stand in 1,100°C heat and throw handfuls of rock salt directly into the kiln, a technique she learned from a Bavarian potter in 2019.
