In the Biblical story of the Exodus, the Children of Israel having escaped slavery in Egypt find themselves wandering the desert outside the Promised Land. The presence of the God of their fathers manifests to them as a gigantic pillar made of cloud, which moves ahead of them in the wilderness. At night the pillar glows with fire. This not only signals the divine presence hidden within, it also acts as a kind of giant lantern, marking out a great circle of safety in the desert darkness. Despite the fact that the God of Israel had set up taboos against representation, he nevertheless does make physical appearances throughout the Hebrew Bible- sometimes in the form of an angel or a disembodied voice, but mostly as something dramatic like a fire, thunder and lightning or billowing smoke.  In Greek the appearance of a god was called a “theophany”.

In the early 1970’s I began making drawings of suspended sculptures composed of semitransparent shapes strung together, hovering in mid air like mysterious pillars. Not sure how to proceed technically with their actual construction, I moved on to other projects, although I never stopped doing these drawings. Over the years I would often think of the Theophany in the Wilderness and a number of times I attempted to design a sculpture of the Pillars of Fire and Cloud- but I was always left unsatisfied with the results.

In 2015 I purchased a set of mid-century hanging lamps made of acrylic and strung with many yards of nylon thread to create geometric shapes. Although Anton Pevsner and Naum Gabo first used this design with threads and planes in modern sculpture, my mentor, the art dealer/designer Adi Fitzner, later popularized it. Adi was the man who launched my professional art career. He sold my first mobiles when I was just 16 years old at his Holland America House in Manhattan.  I had completely forgotten about these extraordinary lamps created by Adi until I found them at auction.  As I cleaned and restrung them I suddenly realized that these materials would be perfect to create the ethereal columns I’d been thinking about for more than half my life.   It was as if Adi was giving me a gift from the other side.

Having constructed my own shapes I added another element: dichroic film. The color-shifting effects created by the film coupled with the hundreds of Nylon lines resembled brilliant gemstones or fireworks. At last I had manifested those hovering sculptures I had so long dreamed of making.  The story of the Theophany in the Wilderness came back to me again: the dichroic pieces with their brilliant colors echoing the Pillar of Fire, and the transparent, colorless pieces echoing the Pillar of Cloud. Without realizing it, I had also achieved another artistic goal: I finally had my Pillars of Fire and Cloud.