

The avocado pit breaks right before it sprouts.
As someone who grew up among avocado plantations, I’ve come to realize that my artistic practice is similar to that of the soft, fresh avocado sprout: emerging through a crack in the hard pit to create something new.
My first work, 'Traces', was a paper-theatre piece based on a childhood memory. It tells the story of a child who wakes up in the children’s dormitory of the Kibbutz[1], and embarks on a journey back to her parents' home. On her way, she rides clouds and circles the moon, as paper landscapes unfold before her and everyday surroundings morph into a fantastic universe. When she finally reaches home she finds the front door locked, and falls asleep on the doorstep.
I have identified a similar nucleus, or “creative seed” in all of my artistic work since this first piece, though it has taken on different manifestations: I find myself drawn to the encounter with a stubborn, hard, blocking force. I devote myself fully to the encounter; I settle in it and observe the discomfort, the fear and the frustration that arise. My work is an attempt to break through this force, to grow wild weeds through the asphalt and offer a fantasy-based protest against absolute reality.I wait by the door until beauty, sound, magic, intimacy, tenderness, colour, a story - are finally found.
The locked doors I encounter force me to look for a new perspective and push through the crack into a new world, redefined in every project.
In the piece 'A Light Hour Away', the force was a romantic one. This work was created while standing outside the locked door of unrequited love, a lover’s heart that had been shut close.
In the farewell letter I wrote to her, I mention a pride of peacocks that lives near my home. The peacocks led me to the story of Io, the mythological nymph that caused the peacock's tail to be laden by a hundred eyes, which led me to the moon of Io, which astronomers call ‘the suffering moon’. The work took place in the botanical gardens of Jerusalem, and became a celebration of healing filled with color: I metamorphosed into a giant peacock with a hundred bright eyes on its tail. I turned the frozen moon with my bicycle. The lavender that i had planted in our former shared-bed was watered with tears.
In ‘Rehearsing the Way Home’, the artistic process began when I returned to the place I had left ten years earlier, slamming the door behind me - the kibbutz. I lived there for six months, a kind of personal “artist residency”. In the piece I hosted the audience in the place I swore never to return to.
‘Second chance’ was a piece meant to challenge forms of disciplining and oppression, both psychological and systemic. The piece was devised and performed in a classroom in which the performers and I spent a year. We confronted our educational and social challenges, our special needs, the tests we face in our adult lives, and our need for a second chance.
The audience sat in the classroom as each of us went through their own process: I planted wheat in textbooks, May fled to the sea to fish with a soccer net, Rotem developed mathematical formulas to solve the delicate and painful questions of the soul, Sharon tried to turn back time by breaking the tables and changing the landscape of the classroom.
In the piece ,Cardiophone’, I developed a technique that allows people to hear the melody of their own hearts through a music box and an ECG device. The piece was conceptualized In the face of my grandmother's death, whose heartbeats were drawn daily on a screen above her hospital bed, I was suddenly met with a strong desire to have some memento, some physical testimony to the heartbeat of the woman I loved so much. During the grieving process I realized that I must translate the motion of the heart into a melody; Though I did not have the chance to transform my grandmother's heartbeat into music before she passed, the cardiophone has since played its melodies in Israel and abroad, in bell towers, kindergartens, museums, theatres, private homes and festivals, and will continue to travel the world.
My journey as an artist is paved by the obstacles I encounter, requiring ever-changing tools and forms. My works embody fragments from this life-long journey, and are offered to the audience as souvenirs to carry as the journey continues.
[1]The children’s dormitory was a concept in the early days of the Kibbutz where children would spend most of their time here, away from their parents’ home.