I began my journey with an undergraduate degree from the Midrasha College of Art at the Beit Berl Academic College (2012) and earned an MFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (2015), following my interest in the human body and the machine. What fascinates me is the link between processes and illnesses taking form within the body, and between failures in machines and materials. I seek the interfaces and the sites at which breakdown takes place, and when I locate them it is an exciting discovery for me. My practice examines the expressive possibilities of the body-mind tie in terms of concepts of pain, disintegration, and loss. Mechanisms of illness often succeed in turning into an encoding system of a new aesthetic language that becomes associated with additional worlds of content.
Much of my work refers to pain, which I see as a kind of “osmotic pressure” – materials filter in until equilibrium is achieved between external and internal stress, between the generators of the internal pain and the factors causing external pain. Thus, the body is the major actor in my works, although it rarely appears directly, but only indirectly, in hints. Most of my references to the body are taken from medicine and paramedical practices, such as X-rays, angiograms (in this case of blood vessels in the brain), and more.
Inert and organic materials originating in my own and foreign bodies are the elements with which I work. Like a chemical reaction, they undergo a transformation to come together into a lyrical image that sometimes loses its source entirely a process of abstraction.
Similar to producing a sound which is reflected back as an echo, my work turns to parallel worlds which respond in poetry, painting, and body art. These are the realms which I visit and from which I always return to photography, as I am deeply rooted in its tradition and history.
Over the past few years, scanning has become my major work mode. While the camera is the natural extension of the eye and body of the subject who gazes, the scanner maintains an objective distance, without a stance or hierarchy, remaining simultaneously unemotional and sensuous.
The images entice me, like secrets which I must decipher. At the beginning of the process, I often confront them without rational understanding, and only at a later stage is their essence revealed to me. Their lure stems from their visibility and the narrative that each image brings with it. In one of my early bodies of work (2015–16) I printed various images on paper not intended for printing. As a result, I lost control over the appearance of the final image. Some of the images originated in a collection of hemorrhages I photographed, indicating an intricate link between the image itself and its mode of representation in an ostensibly technically inferior print. The hemorrhage image itself resembles an abstract painting. Due to the type of paper used, the printer, too, creates "hemorrhages." This is an example of a fundamental process in my work that binds the material transformations and the narrative innate to the original image. Another example of this modus operandi is discernible in a later series I featured in the exhibition "Epidermis" (2019, curator: Smadar Sheffi), where the raw material was scabs, which were placed on paper and transformed into "celestial bodies" by means of the cyanotype technique. In the next phase, the cyanotype surfaces were scanned and turned into a digital collage, which was printed on large photographic paper.
This, too, exemplifies a connection between the material's processing and the chosen image.
I continue working with products of various physical examinations, such as analogue X-rays, which I print using cyanotype, assembling them into new images. The body is only a point of departure for these images. Mechanisms of disease can sometimes become a way of encoding a new aesthetic language that communicates with other content worlds.