Sheli Lehadpasa (Mine for printing)

Art constitutes a tool for contending with difficult psychological situations. A situation of loss and pain generates creative forces. An illness triggered fervent creativity in my mother. The trauma following her illness and death created in me a need to draw closer to the material she left behind, to her artistic creation, her handwriting, her voice.

Through the texts and by sounding her voice I revive her image in some way, her unique hand writing that might even appear as sketches, her writing abilities; I preserve her voice and her acting abilities.

I enter her draft texts with awe and trepidation. There is something profoundly intimate in reading the drafts, a going behind the scenes, the deletions, the unrefined sentences, the raw texts, a work in progress, the search process, the creative process. I am reluctant to touch the material, but there is a need to investigate the end, the hidden, the “absence” through the lines she left behind.

This text was written after my mother's death. I did not finish this project. This work was never displayed as an installation. I did display my mother's drafts in a video-art.