Adornment

Questions of how trauma is expressed in our bodies, our memory and our relationships are the questions that preoccupy my art practice. What do we do with those stories that have been passed on and felt through generations? How can the weight of a traumatic history impose itself onto the body and permeate our imagination in insidious ways?

As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors I find myself faced with the responsibility of responding to a call to remember and preserve the stories I grew up hearing while at the same time trying to free myself from this responsibility. “Crawl to Stand” is an attempt to navigate through the many layers of a terrifying and complex history and find a place for these layers to breathe and be seen.

Woven through the narratives of my grandparents’ testimonies are astonishing tales of hiding and escape. Survival for them meant crawling in the forest, concealed behind trees or sleeping in strangers’ barns, shrouded amongst clothes, sheets and other raw and found materials, which became tools of survival and places of respite.

Their stories exist, for me, in the realm of inherited memory and imagination, feeling both impossible to grasp and terrifyingly palpable. My point of access to these stories is through an interaction with textures and materials; finding and forming them into objects imbued with feeling and transformed into constructed relics of trauma.

Through these physical exchanges with materials, I am able to both reconstruct their stories and enact the challenges inherent in carrying and being concealed within a history that was never directly experienced but has nevertheless left a deep physical and psychological imprint. Knowing that any attempt to try to retell these stories will only result in failure, I hope, instead, to reconstruct them from a place of personal feeling and fantasy so that these stories might become animate outside of the realm of reiteration.