Tethered, 2021

This piece was featured in Artforum’s Article “States of Mind: Toward and Alternative Future for Jewish Art” by Solomon Brager, August 15, 2022

Artist statement:

21 lambs were born on our farm in the cold nights of February– most, smoothly on their own– but two needed my help. I knelt in the damp hay in the barn, reaching past my own swollen pregnant belly to help usher two little lambs, wet and sneezing, into this realm. 

A month later, shortly before daybreak on Passover, my baby came in a pool of water in our living room. As I felt my firstborn child emerging from her internal world, I also felt the presence of death hovering, watching us. I called out, “put lamb's blood on the door!” My partner hurriedly fished a packet of lamb chops out of the freezer and placed it on our front porch, which was the best we could do under the circumstances. The baby arrived safely, but was followed by a gratuitous river of blood. My midwives called out to keep me awake as the baby nursed vigorously and kicked my belly, helping the bleeding to stop. Our new baby, my partner, our doula, and the midwives all worked together to stop my bleeding, and to keep me firmly on this earth. 

This piece, “Tethered” is a glass vessel which holds equal volumes of lamb’s blood and my breast milk mixed with water. The piece is photographed on the spot where our baby was born, the spot where I felt the curtain between the worlds open. The work is a meditation on that moment. It places the blood and the milk in balance, as two sides of an equation; each bodily fluid standing in for experiences of the continually unfolding sacrifices that tether together parenting, art making, work, personal identity, farming, collaboration, and living in a pandemic.

Glass object fabricated by Yiyi Wei 

Special thanks also to Adam Yorks 

“Tethered” was created for the Havruta Project

“At the start of the Havruta project, I was rotundly pregnant and nervously avoiding human interaction due to Covid safety. I was paired with photographer Hannah Altman, who visited our farm multiple times (masked!) to photograph the simultaneous pregnancies of myself and our flock of sheep. Hannah’s photographs and my sculpture function as call-and-response companion works, as two distinct viewpoints on the same events.”

About Havruta:

“Havruta” exhibited at Heaven Gallery from October 29 - December 5th, 2021
Organized by: Liam Ze’ev O’Connor and Shterna Goldbloom

Artist talk: Sunday November 7, 2021

With artists: Hannah Altman, Rachel Fein-Smolinski, Shterna Goldbloom, Charlie Manion, SaraNoa Mark, Isabel Mattia, Liam Ze’ev O’Connor, Roni Packer, Tamar Paley, Izah Ransohoff, Val Schlosberg, Suzanne Silver, Olive Stefanski, Michael Swartz.

Havruta (from Aramaic for "Friend") is a traditional approach to studying Jewish texts with a partner. Unlike other modes of study, havruta learning is often boisterous and animated: students read text and commentary aloud and analyze, question, and debate until they reach a mutual understanding. As they construct and reconstruct the text, students are known to gesture wildly or even shout at each other. The meaning comes from the relationship formed between the three partners, two people and one text. In a world that views students as vessels to fill with knowledge, this approach is a radical one. Students become co-creators of knowledge, shaping and changing the texts through the intimate experience of listening, and questioning.

For Havruta, seven pairs of artists studied Jewish texts and made new works together. Responding to the way that the pandemic has distorted our days and weeks, the texts we selected to focus on Jewish conceptions of time. They range from traditional Talmud, Yiddish and Hebrew Poetry, and Jewish philosophy. In this moment where our sense of community has become precarious, we view this show as an opportunity to facilitate an intimate and generative experience of creating art through and across time. By bringing together artists from across the city and the country, we hope to nurture and develop these collaborations to create even more moments of heated discussion, exaggerated gestures, and strange questions.