STATEMENT
I am a New York-based interdisciplinary artist. I was born in Crimea, Ukraine and raised in Israel. I work in fiber media art, performance and installation. In navigating the complexities of the personal identity, I emphasize issues of migration, sustainability and holistic healing practices. I embody a caring agent who stands in direct interaction with her surroundings to bridge between cultural and spiritual contexts that I inhabit. Drawing from my immigrant journey, healing modalities, and personal mythos, I forge channels for healing among humans and between humans and the Earth. My woven sculptures and multi sensory performances allude to the mythical space for communication through tactile woven surfaces, scent, sound, natural elements and fresh plants. My work emphasizes interconnection between humans, gives agency to plants, and tells stories with natural elements, weaving together realities that may seem disconnected.
I employ both materials inspired by my birth place and environments that I lived in and visited. These material qualities attribute meaning to my work and often serve as sensory agents that evoke memories and build new connections. More recently, I use paper as a sculptural weaving material. I spin paper into a yarn which I further dye and weave into a three dimensional sculpture. This process has a slow ritualistic rhythm and the meditative quality as I reverse the processed generic paper into a yarn that has an imprint of hand touch and an organic origin.
Throughout my practice, my teachers were amazing humans, places and environments that shared with me their offerings. I learned the practice of weaving that is the anchor in my work from the teachers and predecessors who opened up the possibilities to understand weaving not necessarily as a flat rectangle but as malleable three dimensional shapeshifter. I learned that the quality, flexibility and texture encode the cloth with the capacity to expand, hold the information and transform itself. My woven sculptures carry theatrical and mythological motives serving as a spiritual and political container for speculative storytelling and re-imagination.