After Many Gods
The project "After Many Gods" addresses the Abrahamic tradition through three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The work explores how each of them understands, in its own way, the relationship between God, the world, and the human being, and translates these ideas into ceramic form.
I am interested in how, out of an earlier religious environment in which polytheistic forms of belief existed, the idea of one God gradually crystallized. This idea became the foundation of the Abrahamic tradition, but in different religions it took different forms.
The dark glossy base is connected with Judaism. It refers to the earlier religious ground from which the monotheistic logic of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament gradually formed. This ground does not disappear completely, but is transformed and remains as an archaic, deep layer: a memory of the polytheistic and cultic world, reinterpreted through the idea of one transcendent God.
The brown form is connected with Christianity. It grows out of the dark base, because Christianity emerges from the ground of the Old Testament and develops it in a new direction, where the idea of one God gains additional complexity.
The grey form is connected with Islam. It continues the Abrahamic line, but moves it toward a purification of monotheistic logic after the Christian complexification.
The project asks: how can ideas about God, formed within the Abrahamic tradition, be translated into material, and how can theological structures be approached as spatial and bodily relations?
After Many Gods
Ceramics
Author: D. Romanov
2026