Interview: Artist Spends 15 Years Using the Dead Sea as Her Studio

The Dead Sea attracted me as an artist because I believe that it is a place where truth and spirituality are in a way “tangible.” The different rules of gravity and light, beauty and sterility, and a lot of childhood memories are what brought me time and time again to create, experiment, shoot, sail, and crystalize memories in this one lake.

In 2002, just before my mother’s death, I exhibited a show called The Country in the basement of a Tel Aviv gallery depicting allegorically with Dionysian urgency—a world of bloodbaths taken from the second intifada terror attacks of those days.

 

In that installation, which was impactful, I used agriculture, a fundamental theme in Zionist identity, agenda, and practice, with the return to the land as “new-Jews,” in a metaphoric way—and the scene I depicted there was a harvest of red fruit which I made from daily newspapers.

 

A year later, after losing my mother, I looked for a less allegorical fruit and more physical presence … my search ended when I discovered the findings of desert-water researchers regarding watermelons. Watermelons are sweeter and with a thinner rind if they are watered with undrinkable saline water from wells which are located in the Arava desert, not far from the southern part of the Dead Sea.

 

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