“Beyond the sea, beyond the sea, Will you birds know thither to go*” wrote H. N. Bialik in his poem that expresses the wishful thinking of a child in an adult world sailing in his imagination to faraway places, daydreaming. Meira Grossinger puts dreaming in the center of her work, revealing its fragility. She points to the visibility of her longing for another place as a skylight to peer through at the shaky and uncertain, the threatening and the bleeding in the life of the individual and in society’s day to day reality.
Her creation in the exhibit is composed of shreds of cloth and radiates pain and loneliness and struggle to survive, planted in a primitive and wild landscape. This creates a link both familiar and alien at the same time: characters, mainly of children and animals are located amid fragments of nature. They express the yearning for another place, a primordial and ritualistic virgin land, untouched sea depths and unfiltered contact with the environment. This is a time of Aboriginal dreaming – dreams of a different sort altogether than Western dreams – a time when, according to the Creation Epic of the Aborigines in Australia, lived the first people and dreamed of the future to come, and thus created while singing and playing, the animals and plants, the sun, the moon and the stars, the mountains, valleys and rivers and the people on earth.
In all the years of her work, Grossinger has been inspired by indigenous cultures. The current exhibit creates a connection with an Aboriginal culture that sees the signs and symbols of dreams, i.e. Creation, in the ongoing solidity of nature, as being part of infinite existence. She speaks of their ritual that revolves around the personification of nature and marks the mythological fathers as existing in animals, plants and soil. In the same breath, Grossinger expresses the impossibility of such a link. Nature is an imaginary space for those who live in Western society, which is an expression of instrumentalism and the empowerment of man seeking artificial means to touch sensuality, wildness and mystery, amidst modern, contemporary life. The “I” who lives in orderly and regulated intelligent systems,  seemingly marks the metaphysical found in nature, as a means through which one can reach beyond everyday pain filled existence.

Grossinger’s choice in recent years to work in textiles, having previously worked in paper and wood, is not accidental. Textiles are soft sculptural materials, their origins are in nature, but they are entirely manmade. Within the theme of practicality and knowledge, memories, entire traditions and cultural codes, they glorify man and are for him like a second skin, allowing him to assume and remove identities; they cover and protect him, absorb his sweat and dress his wounds. Grossinger uses textiles that she finds — remnants of clothing and yarn which she unravels along with sponges, pieces of metal and old furniture — and harnesses their material and metaphorical qualities to create a new narrative, consisting entirely of parts of the deep-rooted stories of the collective subconscious. Landscapes that seem foreign in their texture and colors indicate the here and now, like the naked trees made into furniture. From their branches hang fruit which are slingshots – used nylon stockings with their shape of the female body, but they contain stones. Grossinger’s trees echo the ritual acts of tying fabrics onto trees, of the process of symbolism and idolatry, of worship and submission. The slingshots on the branches represent the pervasive daily violence of Israel, changing its face, disrupting the possibility of idyll.

The characters are all made of layers upon layers of textiles combined with iron construction that the artist found and designed to create an outline of the human reality of injury, suffering and the search for salvation: the little boy, lone, wounded and bruised-looking; the girl extending her hands; the earth-woman, whose upper body is open, carries with her a bouquet of doll’s heads in one hand and of limbs in the other, which represent children watched over by a brutal Dingo. Another work is of a wounded deer kneeling. In all of these, the textile, in its various incarnations of embroidery, knitting, weaving and sewing, is the interior and the exterior, the painting and its canvas, the ritual ornamentation and the skin, the actor and the mask, the wound and its healing. In her previous exhibition in the Jaffa port, “The Backyard – or Childhood Memories” Grossinger dealt with second generationHolocaust survivors, in repressed memories, and there too used various textiles in combination with wires and other found objects that created a kind of theater of the absurd, of an ephemeral cage that is an entire world. As the current exhibit is an entire installation, the space opens into a refined though fragmentary view that is all aimlessness and ruin, remnants of beauty without the possibility of happiness. In another section, baskets are hanging from the ceiling and rolling on the floor. These containers represent the essence of human activity, but they express alienation and neglect. Thus, the mother’s tragic words at the beginning of Hanoch Levin’s play “The Child Dreams” arises in one’s thoughts: “Timestop now, at the height of joy / because better it will never be; so that the three of us should become a still life/Parents looking at a dreaming child.”

In the installation-exhibit, Grossinger dismantles any possibility of coherent understanding of the image and the world, and yet cannot stop trying. Thus, in a video an image of her head emerges above the water projected in an object like a floating fish – suggesting Jonah and the whale, and the act of prophecy/art that the artist cannot escape from. Before us is a dystopia of fears, memories and unrealized longings – a dream of creation, a dream of disintegration.

*Translation by Faye Schreiber