I only Know to Embroider Myself

Curator: Michal Krasny

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Debbie Oshrat continues to deal with femininity and complexity between intimacy and loneliness. Oshrat uses a unique technique that combines aesthetics and delicacy. Her embroidery works incorporate familiar materials from everyday life, such as used coffee sacks, tea bags, cloth gloves or fabric sheets. These simple materials, which are associated with the world of Ready Made, receive new life and new meaning.

In the current exhibition "I only know to Embroider myself", Oshrat seeks to examine the encounter between materials identified with femininity and painful contents dealing with fear. Her works, wrapped in spiritual shamanic inspiration, seek to touch places of healing, renewal, and movement between worlds. Through the use of ceremonial images and laborious creation, she presents feminine wisdom as a mysterious and motivating force, which explores the tension between fragility and power. Thus, a central theme is created that deals with transformation, memory and the ability to create renewal from an experience of fear and pain.

It is the first time that Oshrat has focused on her own voice, seeking to delve deeper into herself, focusing on intuitive images that develop in combination with materials familiar to her and the unique language she has developed over the years. This combination gives her works material and symbolic depth, while continuing to expand the boundaries of her visual language. Her works in the exhibition are a testament to her inner journey in which she uses the artistic medium to touch the roots of her soul and create a dialogue with herself. The exhibition features several series, most of which have not been presented in the past, certainly not in an exhibition dedicated to a personal and intimate theme, which requires quite a bit of exposure and openness.

A glimpse of one of the series in the exhibition:

Among the works on display in the exhibition is the "Between Matter and Spirit" series, in which Debbie Oshrat connects a botanical embroidery with calligraphies she created herself – this is not a copy of an existing symbols, written language, or a known source, but rather images that stem from deep personal intuition.

The branches and roots are delicately embroidered, and next to them is a seal embroidered in red thread. The repeated stamps fix one’s gaze. At first it seems that this is only a formal gesture, but a continuous glance arises the desire to decipher and try to understand beyond.  A close friend, who was exposed to the works, led to a surprising discovery, that the symbols echo ancient stamp writing, an ancient language that exists on the seam between image and meaning. Although Oshrat did not seek to quote an existing language, she created, unwittingly but with full intention, a consistent set of symbols: there are similarities and opposites, there are repetitions and legalities. The seal is not a decoration, or an artist's signature, but  rather an element that creates another axis in the work – between botanical images and script, between intuitive and encoded. Thus, the possibility of dual reading is opened: one experiential, through the material and the embroider's hand; the other interpretive, through language and spirit. This tension, between what seems obvious, and what calls for further observation and deepening, is what places the series as an intermediate space – not between past and present, but between knowledge and lack of knowledge, and between matter and spirit.