The Carpenter and the Seamstress

The Carpenter and the Seamstress is a floor-based, site-specific installation that merges three-dimensional sculpture with flat drawing into a unified work. It reflects a specific period in the artist’s childhood, reconstructing the floor plan of the family’s apartment - Apt. 6-7, Building 1636/6 on Dov Gur Street in Ashdod. The work uses distinct colors to represent different rooms and furnishings, each symbolizing their unique function within the home.

Encoded within the formal, anonymous, flat, and schematic nature of the drawings are the emotional undercurrents of tension and conflict within the family and home, reminiscent of a computer game. The coded lines of the drawings are based on original recordings of the family over a period of 18 years, made without their knowledge. The mechanical, hand-drawn graphics capture moments of crisis experienced during childhood, transforming them into a synthetic and captivating language inspired by the ethnic codes of Moroccan carpet weaving.

The installation was first presented in 2000 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, curated by Ellen Ginton, as part of the exhibition marking the artist’s receipt of the Gottesdiener Prize for a Young Israeli Artist in 1999. It subsequently traveled internationally, being exhibited in 2001 at Deitch Projects in New York, USA, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, and later in 2002 at Kunsthalle Basel in Basel, Switzerland, curated by Cristina Vegh.

Deitch Projects, New York, USA