Full Belly
Explanations by Dr. Orit Gover, Chief Curator of Beth Hatefutsoth
Noon Himmelman’s method of work is spontaneous. You could say that in a sense she does not decide what to do. Although in many cases she makes preliminary sketches and plans, something else always comes out at the end. For example, the current exhibition is based on skateboards. The idea had just come across her way, one morning as she took her morning walk. Suddenly she saw a trash can full of skateboards that someone threw away, twelve of them. As far as she was concerned, someone had sent her a gift. Skateboards were chosen because they are essentially a game. Also choosing to be a victim when your life falls apart is essentially a game played. All we gain (even negative can be profit) to perceive something that is under our control and our choice. But the artist chose not to turn negative into profit.
Skateboarding is a symbol of the ultimate game – playing on it, rising and falling, and it requires a lot of balance, maneuverability and stability. The same thing happened in a marriage that disintegrated. In this respect, the skateboard is used as a substitute for all parts of the body – belly, face, body, but mainly belly. This is because for the artist’s eyes everything comes from her belly or stomach. Although her thinking mechanism sits at the top, what motivates her is her stomach, and the way she makes decisions as well. In her view, the eyes see the external and the belly the inner.
Another material used in the exhibition is mosaics. The mosaic symbolizes colorfulness and diversity, behind which indecision, opinions, thoughts and feelings. The mosaic is made of fragments of vessels that the artist individually collects and breaks. Fractions of buildings are gathered and transformed into complete statues. Creativity is concerned with the artist’s decisions – what to break, how to break, what piece to lay next to the previous, what color, what direction, etc. This gives the possibility to produce “a lot” and in full control. The choice and control symbolize opinions, thoughts, feelings, and the subtle movements within things.
Thoughts…
Marriage life
This exhibition was born out of a crisis experienced by the artist – “It” is over, the previous family disbanded and now there is another family. The “full belly” extracts everything that has not yet been said.
The work began the day her husband left the house. The artist threw out the mutual bed, then took the corners of the bed and created the marital sculpture. The sculpture is made up of two figures – a man and a woman – who were placed in a kind of two iron-plated sarcophagi. Iron is a substance that always looks old but never biodegradable. It can be flexed and is flexible despite its frozen appearance and nature. The edges of the sarcophagi resemble a baking pan with round edges to allow for a smooth removal of the cake, thus giving a hint of the nature of the marriage – you can always leave even if you are buried in an iron sarcophagus. The characters in the sarcophagi are identical in size, beauty, strength, and material components. There is no beautiful or ugly, strong or weak, worth more or less. The only difference is in their character, expressed in color and design. Therefore, there is no guilty or responsible for the dissolution of the family, but there are two different people who have reached the end of their joint journey. Within the components of the characters there are symbolic elements – a wheel that does not end, a roulette with all its meanings, and a simulated belly from a filter, symbolizing something unstable that everything flows through it. In the other image there is a marking of a long axis that symbolizes an aspiration for the stability and connection of energy, body and thought.
The main idea in the marital sculpture is not to show a well-honed product (as we project our marriage externally), but rather to show all the elements of the work as a hint of a real marriage, in a place that is not concealed. As it is said, one never knows what happens between a man and a woman when the door of the house is closed. Outwardly, everything is beautiful but the demons are inside. Choosing the artist in this case was not to “clean” the dirt, but to leave it natural and real.
Motherhood essence
A total of six works – five square and one rectangular.
The entire series talks about life within a family-mold-within which all individuals are lonely. On the face of it, each individual is autonomous, but within the family they are actually dependent. The five works are placed in a strong steel mold, which shows the difficulty of packing all these individuals into a group. In each of the tight squares there is a passage of air and light, their connection to the world. But this connection is behind a glass wall, which places the perspective of the works from the fish’s vantage in the aquarium. It is not us who look at the fish, it is the fish peering ut at us.
The glass panel on each job represents transparency but also opacity. Open air vents allows freedom of interaction with the exterior, but although the characters look out they are still trapped. The spider-like barbed wire that wraps the figures behind the glass represents an inverse paradox – in the web spider the signs are life, while people are desolate and deserted. The work symbolizes the fact that the family was indeed abandoned by the father, but there are also signs of life when the webs are torn. Each square symbolizes one of the sons when the middle is the mother – the artist. Each child has his own material and colorful composition, and the mother is made up of all of them – also gives strength, draws life from them, and thus creates a new family. The mother has five locks open all the time. It comes to symbolize that the family has changed – not disintegrated, but there is a new togetherness.
The rectangular work consists of a sequence of six cracked plates that resemble dried earth furrows. Five of them are bright and placed in a straight line, and a black one is set aside. A plate is a symbol for food and food is life. But in this case life had dried up. The five bright successes are the mother and her four children – “They make me and I make them.” She rests on them and they giver her renewed strength. The black, side plate, which symbolizes the father. Black is not color, black is a color that swallows all the rest. He is destructive, takes and gives nothing. Therefore, even when this plate is smaller than the others, its very color changes the family map. Despite its smallness and the fact that it is in the corner, this plate “swallows” all the rest. A drop of black and everything crumbles. On the other plates, the earth’s furrows are cracked but packed. Cracked but not crumbled. The work represents a point of view of an aerial photograph – someone sees the family from above – from a distance colorful, from up close fractured.
Free figures
A group of six figures, each of which stands for itself and together they constitute an assemblage:
Bypass
This character symbolizes the fact that any blockage leads to liberation, from it to the next blockage and back again, until you reach a place where everything seems to have been released. But-that’s not the case. Everything repeats itself in the cycles of life. But this does not mean that it is bad, as we are used to thinking. Actually, the difficulty creates the need for creativity in finding solutions to the blockage, followed by a stronger flow generates with increased intensity. Thus, the difficulty results in solutions that we bring. In this sculpture, the spaces created by the irons with balls at its ends, simulate the body of a woman, which breaks down into pieces like the atoms surrounding the nucleus. Here too, blockage creates openness and openness creates blockage, a cycle of life we run around. The treatment on both sides of the skateboard is different. On one side is a traditional mosaic stone treatment, which shows stability, past, ability to lean. On the other side there are new materials that symbolize the thinking person, the learner, the interested, the renewed. The dynamism between the constant and the variable, between the ancient and the new, between the colored and the anemic, is reflected in the spaces created between the parts of the iron flowing on both sides of the sculpture.
Strong weak shoulders
Strong, weak shoulders are the same in the eyes of the artist. The structure of the statue with two shoulders perpendicular to each other is meant to symbolize the fact that our reliance is very delicate. This is the reliance on ourselves and our expendable power, which is constantly renewed. The use of two skates connected together in the middle of the head indicates the axis for the search for power. Is there strength and face in the stomach?
Symbiosis
This statue deals with the fact that in marriage you merge from two individuals second to one. On the way you forget the one you were, and live through the other. It is the partnership that forgets the ego and allows the other to live through you.
A unified broken figure
This sculpture simulates a figure broken to pieces and after disintegrating it took all its parts and rebuilt itself. From the fragments, it identified its fractures and parts, and was rebuilt without additions.
= Sold