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Tell us what you do and your beginnings.
I am a visual artist working across various media, particularly relief and installation. My earlier works were based on formative and historical images from Zionist culture, approached with a mix of irony and innocence toward the collective culture I come from.
This was expressed through the choice of industrial, synthetic, and artificial materials to represent these images. My later works build on the earlier ones, both as raw material and as content.
I became interested in treating the works as an organic body that changes over time while seemingly remaining the same. This is one of the reasons I chose to work with materials that transform with time and respond to chemical reactions, such as coffee and different types of metal fibers.
What does your work aim to say?
Above all, my interest lies in creating a physical experience to communicate with the viewer. A good example of what I mean can be found in Caravaggio’s painting The Incredulity of Saint Thomas.
In the painting, Thomas reaches out his finger to touch Christ’s wound after the resurrection. He does not rely solely on what he sees; he must also verify it through touch.
The physical experience I am after lies in the tension between sight and touch, in the need to confirm vision through physical contact. In English, the verb “to touch” is also used metaphorically, as in “to be touched emotionally”.
In my work, I try to translate this metaphorical meaning into a concrete expression of the temptation to touch – almost a reconstruction of that primal moment of doubt between sight and touch.
Where do you find inspiration for your art?
For me, curiosity and attentiveness to my surroundings come before inspiration, because they make me more active in finding interest. A sentence I once heard from a professor during my studies still accompanies me today:
“Work with materials you don’t like. When you work with materials you dislike, you’re not afraid to play with them or destroy them”.
In that sense, I am drawn to material expressions of neglect – mold, rust, corrosion. The banal and the mundane are often the situations and materials where I find inspiration.