Artist's Statement
Black Tide
Human aggression against nature and humanity itself has always been a narrative in my works. In my recent works, I chose to extend the use of fire from merely a creative technique into the narrative itself. Fire has been the first element that allowed man to significantly change his environment and leave his mark on nature. It enabled him to create and to destroy. I use fire for creating specific elements and fusing them into others. The blowtorch is literally used as a brush, leaving its mark on the different materials – each of them responding in its own way. Working with fire is an uncontrolled process for the most part, and leads to different results, depending on many external factors. In some cases, the process actually destroys parts of the piece, rendering them useless, but that is just the nature of the process.
Another centerpiece in my works is the engine, whose invention enabled great achievements in human history, as well as facilitated horrific disasters. The engine becomes the base for urban development, but is also contrasted by nature’s creations growing from within it, symbolizing the never-ending power struggle between man and nature.
As in my other works, the recent works are multi-layered. The base layer is an aluminum mesh, sawed together as a quilt from individual patches, creating a topographical map representing the landscape. Laid upon and forcibly meshed into it is a drawing of a power source, an engine, turbine or reactor that is the infrastructure of an urban landscape. The raw materials used are also symbolic. Metal, transparency film, paper and straw are fused together by fire and are inseparable.
The pieces grow organically on the surface and into the space around it, extending mechanical tendrils, a hybrid creation of nature’s veins and man’s infrastructure, each trying to concur space and resources to survive. The tendrils transverse the different layers, generated in some and terminate in others. The nature of this struggle, for survival, is what makes it so violent.