Alternate Reality

A year ago my homeland was brutally attacked by sadistic terrorists. The cruel, barbarous crimes against humanity which they committed on infants, children, women, elderly and men were something I never expected to see in my lifetime. They reminded me of stories from the past, monstrosities I thought we had left behind. Stories our elders told of pogroms in Europe and elsewhere. The horrors my own grandmother recounted of events which happened closer to home: she was a nurse in the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem during the Hebron massacre of 1929. Until her last day she never forgot the atrocities she saw then, the Jews brutalized by their generations-long neighbors. And, of course and always, there were numerous records from the Holocaust, during which a significant part of my family was murdered… I grew up with these stories and knew the histories. Yet, I wanted to think that the world made progress, that people learned from past mistakes, that humans were inherently good and that we were living in better times. I was so completely, utterly wrong.

When I woke up last October 7th to chaos and confusion, I went into shock. It took days before a partial picture formed. For weeks and months, every piece of new information was more horrendous than the one preceding it. Israelis and worldwide Jewry alike were deeply traumatized and shaken.

It was only natural to expect, in the wake of one of the world’s most horrific terror attacks, as traumatic as 9/11 but more magnified and cruel, that the world would be outraged, or, at the very least, show some empathy. Shockingly, the opposite happened. Immediately after the attack, before many of the victims were even identified and before the bodies of the slaughtered were buried, another abhorrence began unfolding. Dumbfounded, in utter disbelief, and with increasing disgust, I watched as the ancient sickness of antisemitism, masked sometimes behind “Anti Zionism,” began raising its hideous head once more, pouring out of every sewage, everywhere.

As Israel went into a war of survival against fanatical enemies attacking on seven fronts, that antisemitism quickly metastasized in main media reports, on social media, in the halls of the UN, in government offices globally, on college campuses and on the streets of many countries I used to think of as “civilized.” Even the textile art community wasn’t immune. Over the last year, outright lies, reality distortions, fact manipulations, false information, partial-truths, blatant propaganda, hypocrisy, double standards and so much more became everyday occurrences. Anti-Semitic incidents, including an increasing number of real-life violent attacks, grew by hundreds of percentages pretty much everywhere. We’ve slipped into a dark, hateful alternate reality where everything is twisted.

For me, as for many others, EVERYTHING changed on October 7th, 2023. Now that the masks are off, nothing can ever be the same again.

After the attack, I could barely breathe for months. I wasn’t able to go into my studio at all. The exceptionally ugly reality left no room for art. To this day I haven’t been able to create art that deals with the events of October 7th. The pain is still too raw, the trauma too deep. There are continuous threats, the war is ongoing, and we still have over a hundred innocent civilian hostages in captivity, including a baby and a toddler. But as the one-year anniversary of that horrendous day approached, I felt the need to express at least some of my emotions in textile. 

On a bullet-perforated paper shooting target I wrote many of the observations I made in the last year. Things I noticed and learned, of people, organizations, institutions and the world. Ugly, sad, disappointing and scary realizations.  

Once written, I partially covered the text with acrylic paint. This last year, truth had been often obscured by lies. In a world where hate speech openly masquerades as “free speech,” calling evil by its name is dangerous. Haters can say anything they want, but those who stick to the truth are censored and silenced.

I liked the effect of paint on paper, but something was still missing. Texture. I dug through my stash and found some sheers and cheese cloth. The sheers weren’t what I had in mind. The cheese cloth was too opaque. But it made me think of medical gauze, the kind made for wound dressing. It fit the theme, and so I raided our first-aid kit. I found a textured bandage with potential.

When I opened it up completely, it became a loosely-woven, distorted, imperfect web. It was perfect. I found so much symbolism in it. I draped it over the bullet holes, the strong emotions, the ugly facts of reality, the coverup. It added a nice textural dimension. I glued it onto the target with matte medium.

I cut up slashes and tore the gauze. Windows the to the things hiding beneath. Some tears happened on their own. Those, too, felt right.

Then I marked letters on a red piece of fabric. I didn’t use a stencil. I drew the letters by hand, embracing the imperfections. The world is far from perfect, after all, and everything is flawed.

I placed the paper shooting target on a sandwiched quilt background, basted it where it was possible, then pulled the gauze all over. I placed the letters where I wanted them, after playing with them for a while, considering different spacings and directions. 

 

I was planning to machine applique the letters, but when I took the quilt over to my machine I realized that that won’t be possible. The layering of paper, acrylic paint and matte medium resulted in a rather stiff surface. I was simply unable to fold the piece tightly enough to fit into the tiny throat of my small domestic sewing machine.

Hand appliqueing remained the only option. It wasn’t an easy task. Pushing the needle through that stiff surface turned out to be a true hand workout, especially in the parts where the matte medium was thickest. In addition, someone, for some reason, glued bits of masking tape onto the backside of the shooting target. I didn’t think much of it until I tried to stick my needle through the tape. Needles, it turns out, don’t go well through masking tape. They get sticky and jammed. The tape wreaked havoc on the thread as well. I had to use a lot of force to push the needle through those spots. I got stabbed multiple times, to the point of bleeding. This wasn’t a meditative, relaxing stitching experience at all. It was probably the most violent hand stitching undergoing I’ve ever experienced. Sadly, this, too, seemed appropriate for this quilt…

Due to these hurdles, I could only stitch a little every day. I had to give my hands a rest between letters, and even took a day or two off every now and then. 

It was a relief to be done with the letters. The borders were much easier: there, I used random, chaotic seed stitch to hold the gauze down.

Initially, I was planning to face the quilt and give it a tidy, finished look. But during the many hours I ended up hand stitching it, I realized that a raw, fraying, unfinished edge was a lot more on point. I ended up zig-zagging around the edges to keep them from falling apart completely, but otherwise left them as is.

For backing, I happened to find a fitting fabric in my stash: off-white cotton with a gray tangle of thrones. The violent jabs and pulls of the stitching resulted in a flawed back. If you flip the quilt over, you will see numerous stabs, distortions, creases and wrinkles. Those, too, feel perfect in their imperfection, and oh, so very symbolic… 

The finished piece, Alternate Reality, is 28″ x 22.5.” It is one of those artworks that will never be accepted into a show or exhibition. It was important for me to make, however.