DANIEL ELKAYAM

RESIDENCY SHORTLISTED ARTISTS CRAFTS

2026

Daniel Elkayam (b. 1992, Jerusalem) is a multidisciplinary art-designer image-maker based in Amsterdam. A graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven's MFA in Social Design, his practice spans artistic and materialistic research, collectible design, and storytelling through objects. Empathic and deeply attentive to his environment, Elkayam is drawn to nature's hidden beauty and to unconventional, culturally undesirable materials and textures - which he finds in them both excitement and inspiration. He interferes with natural processes - accelerating, decelerating, redirecting but instead of imposing, he rather being attentive to the material will, and humble enough to follow. Working across hand-sculpted forms, Elkayam investigates the threshold between control and release - uncovering beauty in imperfection, transformation, and material resistance. His work reveals overlooked phenomena and narratives of temporality, identity, memory and material culture, often drawing on his surroundings and heritage. Through poetic, material-rich objects, he questions social and aesthetic norms, bridging conceptual rigor with

“My relationship with material began before I noticed. I was born to a family of 4th generation carpenters. The first dialogue I had with material started with the most “native” for me - wood - taught me the cultural context it had within my family, who saw it less as art but more as means to put bread on the table. I'm interested in the emotional-charge of materials, how they carry meaning also before we assign it and how their charge shifts when context changes. My work reflects materials-duality, localism, degradation. An obsession threads through my work: binaries dismantling - attraction/repulsion, natural/artificial, control/release. Interested of inhabiting these tensions in objects that hold both poles simultaneously. My practice built on direct-encounters: touching, testing, daring and staying present when something unexpected happens. That moment of surprise is not a failure, it’s often where my work begins. Craft, for me, is methodology - the physical, embodied inquiry form that makes research legible as visuals rather than arguments. I construct non-verbal-systems that rise-questions/provoke-discussions about our surroundings, social/cultural conditioning and the maker position within a broader ecology of meaning. My creative identity itself is part of what I examine. I make in-order to locate myself. “