In the More Important Than Bread series, Van Der Hout uses challah, a ritualistically important bread eaten during Shabbat and Jewish holidays, as a scaffold to investigate trauma embedded within beauty. Cast in iron, these bodily abstractions of challah have fossilized. Each bread has transformed into hardened, sharp incarnations of their once soft, fluffy bodies. Holding the bread are slabs that mimic slices of the earth, which have been carved away to perfectly hold and encapsulate each challah. Elegiac and deeply visceral, these reliquaries consider the transmutation of bread, body, ancestry, and religion on a geological scale. 

- Sarah Cho