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In the Wake of the Gaze – Material Remembers, Touches, Liberates
Prof. Tal Dekel and Dr. Hadara Scheflan-Katzav
The story of a mother-artist emerges and converges twice in this exhibition. Two artists, each with a very different life-story, come together in a surprisingly parallel act of creativity. As a result, the real (an experience that cannot be articulated) and the distinctive manage to meet, connect, and weave a joint creative tapestry, astonishing in its similarity, even to its two creators.
The two artists are at a stage in their lives in which motherhood and creativity are inextricably interwoven in their world, a period when the artistry flows and merges entirely within the space of family and motherhood, to the extent that both artists engage in their art in their bedrooms – the most private and intimate place of the home.
This blurring of boundaries is also evident in their artistic style: the treatment of figures and background is almost identical, making it hard to distinguish between the subject of the work and the space surrounding it. The children are at the heart of the picture, but the work also interrogates professional, philosophical, and technical questions – position in space, line and smudge, light and shadow. Thus, boundaries continue to be blurred between the quotidian and the creative, the roles as mother, artist, spouse, friend, and various others, spaces, locations, and definitions.
The dissolution of boundaries is also echoed in how the art is displayed in the exhibit space: The works are integrated, the names of the artists do not appear, thus, viewers are not told which piece belongs to whom. This presentation evokes questions about the artistic ego, particularly of the mother, and metaphorically extends the blurring of boundaries that both artists feel – between the artistic self and the family self.
The Act of Erasure – Between Memory and Forgetting
These works invite the viewer to an encounter with the mental and physical state of the artists, their generous willingness to open a peephole into the maternal experience of mamartists (a portmanteau of “mama” and “artist”). The works allow passage from the drama of life itself to the drama of the art: smudges, lines, and dense charcoal areas that tell the story. The events, in fact, are revealed not only by the material signifier, but no less by the erasures made by the artists, erasures of equal importance to the pencil and charcoal markings. The works show multiple, repeated erasures conveying the presence of that which is missing, and simultaneously, their artistic commitment and honesty – exposing feelings of guilt, regret, and the desire to correct, which are always embedded in the maternal role.
The act of erasure in art – particularly in charcoal drawings – is one in which the signs of the erasure are neither silenced nor concealed, but present and even themselves of artistic value. This process underscores the tension between the erased and the visible, reflecting Jacques Derrida’s philosophy in which no erasure is absolute or final, but leaves behind “traces” – elements of the signifier that had existed before the erasure. These traces draw attention to the presence of elements that are still hidden within the disappearance and emphasize the unseen as an inalienable part of the artwork’s present.
Thus, the erasure exposes the viewer to the concealed layers of the work and the memory. This is a process in which the transient, the effaced, and the overlooked become the subject of visual, emotional, and mental preoccupation. That which is erased embodies the fabric of memory – what endures and what has been displaced, what is present and what has been lost. It functions as an echoing sign of process, of memory and movement. Erasure reveals the multiple meanings, dynamism, and complexity of visibility and absence, reinforcing the feeling that meaning is not stable, but rather constructed and shifting in time and depth.
What remains is a combination of two states that simultaneously exist – the repressed and that which appears above it. In the simultaneity of the drawing and erasure, that which is lost becomes visible while the erasure seems to invite the viewer to peer into the repressed layers.
Revealed within the act of drawing – the image, first drawn then erased, is then re-created in strata of nearness and distance. One finds evidence of the conduct of life itself, just as mother-child relations are a living tapestry of ongoing care by trial and error, and the need to be sensitive to fragility and strength, dependence and independence, nurturing and mutual growth.
Accordingly, motherhood is depicted in art not just as a subject, but also as a practicum in movement: The subjects of the work mediate the experience of managing time between tending to one’s family and one’s art; between an approach to the body and to the soul, always through the eyes of a mother. And thus, not only the charcoal lines and smudges, but also the erasure, a physical sign that leaves behind charcoal that has been effaced, now analogous to the multiple layers of life, particularly of the female identity.
The Maternal Gaze: Between Objectification and Liberation
The works of these artists contain an ongoing, palpable tension between the act of objectifying the children who appear in them and an attempt at their precise depiction with all its subjective complexity. On the one hand, the choice to place the children in the center of the work holds the potential for objectification, for displaying them as objects d’art or household statuary. On the other hand, in locations and moments where traces of erasure remain, where blurriness becomes part of the drawing and figures “flee” from the gaze, the child may have an independent and subjective presence. These are moments of grace not only for the child depicted but also for the mother herself, because it is the very artistic gaze that enables her release – to see her child as distinct from her, as an independent being, not just an extension of herself. Sometimes the child in the artwork seems to be not only the object of the mother’s gaze, but also one who returns the gaze, dissolving and vanishing.
Thus, a dynamic of devotion is evident – devotion to art and thence devotion to the child, and vice versa. As noted by the artists themselves, they have no desire to abandon their creative activity as they have a deep commitment to it, but at the same time they struggle to be active and present as mothers and to fulfill the maternal role to the satisfaction of the children and themselves. Both artists draw from the wellspring of home, the children, and motherhood, but then re-enter the meditative world of professional, reflexive creativity that deals with matters unrelated to family or parenting.
Feelings of distress and guilt as well as happiness and fulfillment are the building blocks of the social milieu that affects the artistic-maternal subject. Even though their studios are in their homes, Tigist and Noga allow themselves to sail forth into distant creative climes of line, smudge, and form, and then return to the domestic space. They thereby engage in a dialectic that is actually a spiral. Working in charcoal – its power, its lines both distinct and erased, and touching it and its textures – becomes a space for processing experiences, feelings of happiness and struggle, and moments of crisis. The choice of charcoal, a medium that contains both darkness and light, underscores the sense of transience, the grasping of ephemeral moments of life, and the ongoing effort to simultaneously capture and release.
Care as an Artistic and Maternal Eco-system
Care is at the heart of the creative process in the charcoal works of both artists. Care – broadly understood as concern, solicitude, being attentive to, watching over, safeguarding, and providing daily support – is ingrained in every stroke, erasure, choice of gaze, and curve of the hand. The act of drawing by these two artists functions as an act of caring for another being: Each line delicately follows the contours of the body of the family member, pausing out of sensitivity, attentiveness, observation, or focus on a girl or boy’s pose, gesture, or gaze. Through use of the intractable charcoal – a medium that requires continuous servicing – drawing, erasing, correcting, and renewing – a bond emerges between the artist and the figures, underscoring the care and concern.
Grasping at the fleeting moment and attempting to capture it – the eternal battle to hold onto something slipping through one’s fingers – is the basis of care work – of motherhood in general and mamartistry in particular. Clearly in all the works included in this exhibition, the subjectivity of the figures (the children) is not completely objectified. The maternal-artistic gaze does not merely observe from a distance, but embodies caring, acknowledges the right of the child to gaze in return, and that the child is a being that can be active, present, or elusive, as it prefers.
In this way, locations/openings of grace, ethics, and release appear and manifest themselves: The maternal gaze allows them not just to hold onto the child, but also to let go, to leave behind a disentangled space that is intersubjective. This is particularly evident in moments in which mamartists allow the figure to appear to flee from the center, become blurred, or “return the gaze”. The artists’ methods and work seem to acknowledge that true caring, maternal ethics, are what allow the subject to grow, to distance themself, to be other and different – a separate subject who is active in the world.
Contemporary Mamartistry
These artists continue a longstanding tradition of engagement with motherhood and children, a recurring theme in art history from ancient to contemporary times. This tradition framed the gaze on motherhood in power-driven terms – it was essentially a male gaze – and this dominated the discourse as women, even women artists, perpetuated an interest that was not theirs. This changed dramatically in the last two decades of the twentieth century, however, when female artists who became mothers sought to formulate a new gaze of motherhood through their subjectivity. This critical historical transformation allowed for creation of a more complex view, a multi-layered perspective, and above all it allowed the mamartist to draw upon a greater repertoire of experience to tell her story. From that moment, motherhood no longer represented only the traditional male concept of the maternal ideal – as a symbol of tenderness, continuity, and harmony. Now mamartists who address the topic have made it an experiential site of complexity, of emerging identity – sometimes a perspective of happiness, fullness, fulfillment, and love and sometimes a site of tension, pain, loneliness, and struggle.
This exhibition reveals both the intimate and the universal, where there is no clear partition between the mother and the artist, between home and the art. Through the language of charcoal – lines, smudges, erasures, and layers – a refined dialogue emerges between figures and spaces, between the visible and the absent, between grasping tightly and releasing. The works reflect elusive moments that are hard to render – the eternal conflict between closeness and distancing – and invite us to use fresh eyes to see the figure of the mother and her creative process through a gaze that is sensitive and aware.
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