TEXT
Sewing Heartbeats
Orna Noy-Lanir, 2019
Fragments of paper are held together by stitched threads, or bound together as a skeletal structure revealed beneath the surface. At the beginning of the process, the paper served as the canvas and foundation for stitches of various forms: straight, curved, rounded, swirling. The needle rose and fell to the sound of the sewing machine, leaving a perforated trail that marked a skeletal framework, arteries, and veins—an intricate path toward a process of dissolution and melting, blending elements together in an almost alchemical transmutation. Through the "death" of what was, something new would form, flesh would take shape, and a spirit would swell within it.
In her unique technique, Carmon creates images that feel unhomely, organic tissues seemingly suspended in the spaces between life and death, the familiar and the alien, the feminine and the masculine, attraction and repulsion, the imagined and the real. Carmon works with accessible, "lowly" materials—most often parchment paper, but also paper towels, toilet paper, and sanitary napkins—transforming these by coloring, stitching, washing, burning, kneading, and giving a new quality and form to decaying matter.
For Carmon, the artistic exploration, like the process her materials undergo, is never final; it extends beyond the moment her works are displayed. The pieces continue evolving, aging, and decaying, embodying a singular resonance with a memory "for even the sublime has no object," as Julia Kristeva writes. “... A cluster of meanings, colors, words, and caresses—delicate touches, scents, sighs, and rhythms—these arise and envelop me, taking and sweeping me beyond the things I see, hear, or think. The 'object' of the sublime fades into the limitless vibrations of memory, traveling from place to place, from memory to memory, from love to love, guiding this object into the dazzling light where I lose myself to become. The moment I perceive it and name it, the sublime stirs—it always has—an outpouring of perceptions and words, stretching memory to infinity."
Carmon's practices, like sewing, knitting, and embroidery, evoke additional aspects embedded within these arts and the prevalent perception they invoke. Her work follows in the path of feminist artists such as Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks, Eva Hesse, Judy Chicago, Patsy Novell, Michelle Grabner, Anne Wilson, Kristy Whitlock, and many others whose art challenges the paradigm of feminine crafts as mere excessive sensuality in decoration and ornamentation. For Carmon, as for her creative peers, the artworks are indeed a declaration and display of material and labor-intensive excess, demanding equal value. By weaving hair into her pieces, sewing and connecting layers, gathering and drying flowers interwoven with handmade objects, she intentionally blurs boundaries with purposeful intent.
Mazal Carmon:
Gaping Tissues
Irena Gordon, 2016
Mazal Carmon embroiders on parchment paper, and in doing so creates a new material that is both image and support. It is a support that is both paper and parchment, parchment that is skin, skin that is textile, sheets that are structures in space, structures that are enigmatic life forms. “Gaping Tissues” at Hankin Gallery, Holon, is a sequel to Carmon’s 2015 exhibition “Secondary Skin” at Agripas 12 Gallery in Jerusalem. Comprised of several series of old and recent works, it offers a space that is both two and three-dimensional, in which the still objects aspire to be living organisms, flirting with the possibility of metamorphosis.
Carmon treats parchment paper as if it were fabric. She paints, cuts, washes, dries, and warms it, and embroiders its entire surface, with great intensity, in every which way, sometimes in layers. She pierces and scratches the parchment paper, turns it into tactile, sensuous sculptural material. It is not a passive support, but rather takes active part in the work and its development. Serving as support for drawing or painting, both paper and canvas, it is stripped of its familiar qualities.
Carmon arrived at art from the world of textile. Her father was a tailor, and sewing and embroidery are part of her family history. “My biographical memories nourish my artistic endeavor,” she says, “which is underlain by patterns, layers, rhythms, erasure, unstitching, and disintegration.” At the same time, her work is deeply rooted in the language of contemporary art, in which textile has played a key part since the 1960s. Artists such as Robert Morris, Joseph Beuys, and Eva Hesse, who employed soft, common materials, used textile to produce conceptual sculpture; feminist artists employed it to break away from the traditional male hegemony of oil painting and render present the feminine domestic sphere; and a number of contemporary artists, such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Yinka Shonibare, and Chiharu Shiota, use textile to pursue issues related to identity, gender, and narrative.
One of the largest series in Carmon’s exhibition is comprised of small, drawing-like, poetic embroidery works. Despite their yearning for figuration, these works are abstract; despite the variegated chromaticity of the threads, they are monochromatic. They draw on a series of images of brain cells rendered by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1906 Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine. He famously demonstrated that brain tissue is made of distinct cells rather than a net of interconnected neurons. He did so, inter alia, by producing drawings of different types of brain cells and their arborizations. These drawings are used by medical students to this day. Carmon was drawn to these drawings as depictions of internal, rather than external, landscapes. The notion of our organism as made of invisible landscapes led to the creation of the small embroidery works, which straddle interiority and exteriority, with both material and image rendered independent, disengaged from their sources.
This series of drawings develops into another series, titled Memory Conglomerates. These works are based on a grid of horizontal and vertical lines, which underlies embroidery in white and colorful threads. Here, the embroidery is no longer landscape but rather an assembly of signs that extend between, on the one hand, abstract drawing and, on the other, encoded cultural, “digital” signs that render present the deep connection between textile and text. At the same time, Memory Conglomerates – like other works by Carmon, including By a Thread, Parchments, and even the figurine series – seems like an indecipherable palimpsest that contains layers of texts, memories, and cultural strata.
Carmon’s manual work process allows the material to don and doff different forms: it appears as a coral or a high priest’s robe, as parchment or shed skin, as hyssop or prosthetic leg or temple column. Carmon lays out a fan of events that transpire at the junction between paper and textile, and between these two and the tension between culture and nature. She explores textile’s spectacular possibilities vis-à-vis its usage in the daily, domestic sphere. And so, based on sewing patterns from Burda magazine – a past popular household item –she produces spectacular geometric abstracts. And her most recent works, which disengage from two-dimensionality quite emphatically, explore not only their existence in space but also their dramatic, performative spectacularity. Some are structures that recall organic, “natural” environments informed by order and chaos, growth and disintegration. Others recall holy gowns or anthropomorphic totems, their installation in space both primeval and contemporary.
Wisdom of the Heart
in Mazal Carmon’s
Exhibition
Gabi Yair, 2015
I have followed Mazal Carmon’s work for several years. Her works convey precision, refinement, attentiveness to a unique inner code as well as a striving for new directions. Her technique varies every once in a while: labor-intensive clay pieces, realistic drawings and paintings, abstract embroidery on paper, and lately, free-style ink drawings produced with her eyes shut. The works featured in Carmon’s current exhibition at Agripas 12 Gallery in Jerusalem are products of the current stage in her creative process, combining innovation and strict commitment to meticulous execution and selection.
Thinking about the nature of Carmon’s current works after a visit to her studio, I recalled two texts about art and holiness. The first is part of the story about the building of the Tabernacle in the book of Exodus. “And all the women that were wise hearted did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, and of fine linen. And all the women whose heart stirred them up in wisdom spun goats’ hair” (Exodus 35:25–26). As Rashi commented, “… all the women whose hearts inspired them with skill spun the goat hair directly off the living animals into threads; this required special skill.” Without going into the deeper meanings of this story, one may note that both the biblical verses and their homiletic interpretation discern wisdom of the heart, which finds expression in artistic production by women.
The second text that came to mind is part of Zelda’s poem, “The Good Smell of Distances”:
From one end of the world to the
other rove the songs of every people
and language. Parables and signs
come;
The good smell of distances
emanates from them
if on their way they did not
touch the stench of standing
water
or blood.
But the finest of all the
songs is the white
curtain
in which is embroidered with a white
thread: “Silence is Your praise”.*1
Carmon seems to be part of a tendency which has been pursued for over two decades by women artists who produce art works through a personal, female perspective, which includes a choice of materials associated with feminine pursuits (threads, fabrics, clay). These artists made traditional craftsmanship part of the canon of the artistic hegemony in a non-confrontational manner and through a positive outlook. In fact, Carmon does not settle for the parameters of this tendency but challenge herself further. She recounts that Eva Hesse has been a source of inspiration to her in her use of unconventional materials and in combining intentional composition and chance. She identifies with Hesse’s outlook, expressed in her notes, “Materials have resistance, are stimuli; materials – two points of view: a) materials lifeless till given shape by creator, b) materials by their own potential created the world.”*2
The works in her current exhibition exhibit the technical ability of a virtuoso both in the use of traditional crafts and in constructing a new language which allows for diverse readings.
Although one is tempted to regard the exhibition as a collection of inspiring images, upon drawing nearer one may note that its main power lies in an alchemical process, produced in Carmon’s kitchen, whereby she has turned parchment paper into gold abstracts. This is indeed, to use Rashi’s words, a “special skill.”
The poet elevates embroidery to the level of “high” art and attributes to it a sense of holiness which is in correspondence with the charged words embroidered. This ars-poetica poem itself ends in silence.
On one of the walls in Carmon’s studio hung the work Figurine (2014). The work’s upper section is made of processed and folded paper, like a three-dimensional Rorschach stain which, among other things, recalls an ancient mask. The lower section is a continuation of the same paper support without folding. As it is almost flat, it allows one to notice the various stages of the craftwork put into it. The final outcome combines richly nuanced abstraction, sewing, and folding, and is both modern and archaic at the same time. Produced through experimentation and unique, contemporary craftsmanship, the work looks like an ancient museum piece which conveys “parables and signs” from another era. Another work, titled Shed Skin (2014), looks as if it was taken from a zoological display. The paper was first “abused” and then treated by more refined means, and the resulting effect recalls the skin of a living creature. A few sewing threads extend from it, resembling scraps of hair. It is an envelope composed of tiny fragments pieced together with great sensitivity. This meticulous piecing together results in an image, which, although partial, offers an illusion of the envelope’s original form, a fragile image of animal remains.
In both these works, as in other works by Carmon, reiteration is an underlying creative principle. The impulse behind the works is experimentation, which results in an image, followed by continued exploration until she reaches an image that corresponds to some memory from her inner world. This process, undertaken over the past few years, has produced works which, as mentioned above, resemble archaeological or zoological exhibits. These works should be approached like a rare collection of ancient ritual objects, fossils, or corals. Each exhibit is unique, an archetypical example of a particular direction in the artist’s exploration. The three- dimensional works are mostly exhibited hung on walls, at times placed on pedestals. All of them lack a constructive skeleton and are therefore endowed with a delicate, vulnerable, humble aspect. All are made of processed parchment paper. Some are composed of pieces of papers interlaced with wire nets, order and lack of order finding balance in them. Others are produced through various acts of removal and unstitching, controlled random acts through which their texture becomes less dense.
Carmon washes the paper, dries it, sears it with fire, paints and stitches it – in changing order, depending on the work at hand. These are all daily skills, reflecting the fact that her studio is located inside her home and her artistic endeavor takes place in conjunction with housework. The natural shift she makes between them offers both flexibility and inspiration. “Sewing and embroidery are part of my family’s history,” she says. “The sound of sewing machines and the movement of hands as they slide the fabric along are the music and movements of which my own choreography has been composed. Just as the sewing workshop was part of my parents’ home, so is the studio part of mine. My biographical memories nourish my artistic endeavor, which is underlain by patterns, layers, rhythms, erasure, unstitching, and disintegration.”
*1 Zelda, “The Good Smell of Distances,” trans. Zvi Mark, in Zvi Mark, “Distant Signs and Ancient Wonders: Hasidic Faith in the Poetry of Zelda,” Havruta, no. 3 (Spring 2009), pp. 70–71.
*2 Eva Hesse quoted in Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. 13.