Mother
My mother lost her first husband to the 1948 war.
She lost her mother and sister to the hardships of immigration.
Her losses did not shake her belief in Zionism, or her enthusiasm about acquiring a new language in order to communicate with her second husband. She is fluent in five languages, but her Alzheimer causes her to forget them one by one.
Sitting across from her for many hours, I sketch her likeness.
Then I make hundreds of little holes in the cloth following the lines of her image. When I work, while sitting across from her, she always asks to see the embroidery and is always impressed as if she were seeing it for the first time. She asks me, " Who is that woman?"
"It is you, Imale" I tell her, over and over again.
She claims it doesn't look like her.
When I work with photos of her as a beautiful young woman she smiles, but is disappointed that she cannot remember where or when the photos were taken.
Past and present become confused together. Her memory is becoming a knot of threads, impossible to untangle.
Series of 15 embroideries, 46*53 cm and 7 etchings, 21*29.5, 2011–2012
