Yael Barlev
Artist Statement
As a little girl, in my room, above my bed, there was a tapestry that my mother had embroidered for me with two dogs eating a chicken… As an artist, it is this old memory that drives me to works that have a double meaning - delicate and soft works that depict terrifying scenes.
My source of inspiration and images comes from my memories and experience. I find myself returning to the same imagery over and over again. My works deceive and engage the viewers in an attempt to decipher their double meaning: On the one hand, thin, illustrated lines and soft embroidery threads, airy silhouettes, fragile-looking. On the other hand, the images themselves are revealed to us: monstrous animals with sharp teeth, faceless girls in short dresses, rickety houses flying like a kite on a string or cobwebs that seem to have emerged from a terrifying nightmare.
Usually, I work in series. For example, I take parchment paper, tear it to pieces and layer it in a free and expressive way to dry. At the end of the process, those dried paper sheets become fragile, crispy and have a new look of wrinkled skin which I draw delicately with ink and pen, and embroider with red thread. Another work series that can shed light on my works consists of drawings made by using embroidery red thread and placed in glass boxes. The hard and stiff look contradicts the delicate appearance which opposes the painful meaning of the works.
Lately, my main mediums are fabric collage on canvas and watercolors drawings. The two series were created from reference and processing of personal memories and are built in layers like an archive.
My works are done manually and mostly Sisyphean. The embroidering and piercing operations symbolize in my eyes, a wound and a reference to the handicrafts that were mainly done by women.
The recurring motifs in the works are drawn from my private world but the story that emerges from the works is not my personal story, and the scenes I choose to present are instantly and universally read.