Holding Memory, Holding Questions

For me, art has always been about finding a language to process the events of my life and the realities unfolding around me. Each work begins in response to something deeply felt: an absence, a memory, a transformation. Making art is how I hold, think, and ultimately move through those experiences.

That process began with Sabta, a series created with and for my grandmother. While I was first learning photography, she insisted I take her portrait. True to her spirited nature, she directed the session herself, overacting, staging scenes, performing her life with theatrical flair. Between the clicks, we discovered each other, two women of different generations meeting in the act of making. When she passed shortly after, those images became her legacy, and for me, the series became a way to remain connected.

Again and again, I return to the question of home. My kibbutz, Ein HaShlosha, was once the heart of my world, a place shaped by simplicity, community, and a deep sense of belonging. Yet it has also been scarred by loss and violence. Living in the United States, I carry that place within me, distant but never apart. After the 2014 war, I turned to the land itself, finding in its flowers, birds, and trees vessels for memory and testimony. In the Chatzav and the Calanit, I found metaphors for endurance; in scorched wheat fields and blackened cactus, I confronted devastation. These works became not only about political conflict but about the ways land and body withstand together.

Over time, my materials shifted: burnt rope, stitched seams, woven thread. But the impulse remained the same: to process what life places before me. In Barbed Wire, thread softened the harshness of division. In The Wheat Still Grows, the land itself bore witness. Later, the quiet presence of water lilies in Vermont and the tenacity of weeds in New York entered this continuum, unexpected emblems of persistence that surface where one least expects them.

October 7 changed everything. The place of my childhood, my home, was brutally attacked. The grief is immeasurable. In its wake, my work has taken on new urgency: to hold memory, to stitch together what feels torn apart, and to create spaces where resilience and remembrance can coexist. Art becomes not only a record of loss but also a way forward. In the studio, this has meant working with greater immediacy and intensity, allowing the rawness of the moment to shape both material and scale.

What connects these works is necessity. I make art because I must, because life demands it. Each piece is a conversation with memory, with loss, with landscapes both distant and immediate. I am not seeking resolution but rather a space to live with complexity. Art allows me to sit inside contradictions: sorrow with beauty, distance with belonging, fracture with repair.

Ultimately, my work is less about answers than about holding questions: How do we carry what has been lost? How do we recognize strength in what appears fragile? How do we honor landscapes marked by beauty and violence?

What remains is not a single narrative but a body of work shaped by necessity, born of life’s ruptures, sustained by its continuities. For me, art is not a detour from living; it is how I live.