Artist Statement
My artistic path began with traditional, figurative painting in oil on canvas, which evolved into another medium, using the same imagery and narratives. I arrived at my current technique in an attempt to shake off the past, but in effect, it links the ostensibly different poles of my practice.
At present I focus mainly on engraving and hammering on gold aluminum foil. I came to use this material through a memory of craft lessons in school, which I loved as a child, because they gave me a sense of control and freedom at the same time. The act of engraving fixes and perpetuates a passing emotional moment via image or text; at the same time, the metallic substance remains vulnerable and flexible, so it may be distorted and transformed while being processed. I work on dozens of meters of gold aluminum foil, which I divide into differently sized plates-sheets. On the material, I incorporate autobiographical images and texts, some originating in childhood memories from the Soviet Union and from Israel; others are rooted in a trauma I experienced in Israel as an adult, which involved being sucked into a cult and being mentally captive.
Through the childlike "playing" with the material and the recollection of my childhood years, I gradually drew nearer to my past, while remaining distant enough to observe it in an emotional, but nevertheless critical and conscious manner. Reconstruction of the work with the material occurred concurrently with contextual reconstruction, copying diary entries that I wrote in the past, and images I drew and painted in my previous artistic incarnation as a "traditional" painter. The engraving and hammering are, in fact, performed on the verso side of the material (on its silver-colored aluminum side). By creating them reversed (as a mirror image), they are transferred to the other, golden side of the substance, embossed. This process provided me additional distance between the image-text and the emotion that gave rise to them. Moreover, the mirror script also reconstructs a primal experience associated with the perception of script and painterly two-dimensionality, characteristic of children's drawings and early writing, like a child who tells a story or recounts a tale, through which her experiences past and present may be construed.
In the next phase, with wax thread, I sew the plates-sheets to the surface of a stretched canvas on wooden frame, which protects the vulnerable material. This work involves physical exertion and great pain. The sore hands obscure the emotional pain innate to the experience of recollection and the emotional-autobiographical reconstruction. The material and the creative act are thus directly-physically linked to the narrative content of my work.
Contact
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052-894-7784