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Noga in My Heart

Curator: Nurit Tal-Tenne

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“Come my child, let’s make a kite, you will fly and I will be the string” – (Shmuel Cohen)

Debbie uncovers a very sensitive body of works, revealing with a lot of courage the story of her daughter Noga, who suffers from a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder due to mental abuse she experienced during her national service in the IDF. The creation was stimulated by poems, letters and wordings from the daughter’s personal diary, which were processed into toiling art creations by the mother. A transformation process from the written word to the moving hand holding the needle, embroidering on used Tea-Bags. One moment for the Tea-Bags to tear, next moment for them to l heal, patchwork. A mutual voyage of the mother and the daughter, a painful and healing puzzle of partially worn-out emotions, times and words.

Me? My name is Noga, but except for a beautiful and lighted name, everything within me is black . . . –

(from Noga’s diary)

The umbilical cord wrapped around the two, as a thread symbolizing a complex relationship of blood ties. “My wellbeing is connected with a thread to your wellbeing” is embroidered in one of the works, in other works the mother and daughter appear in various closeness remoteness relations.

Mother-Daughter relationship was also a subject in a previous exhibition of the artist, but in an inverted form, dealing then with her relations to her mother who is a holocaust survivor.

 Debbie weaves family stories, autobiography amongst generations, draws and creates Ready Made collages, raising social, gender and feminist questions, using symbols and imageries like: Phallic symbols, spiral figures and mandala shapes implying cyclicality and snuggle. Also, the cross that symbolizes the anguish journey of the mother and daughter, and the ladder that symbolizes an up and down voyage bridging between heaven and earth, and also symbolizes fall and hover.

Ophelia appears in one of the series as a parallel to Noga, her image reveals the mother’s fear for her daughter’s destiny. But, according to current adaptation, Debbie seeks to weave a different future to Ophelia, growing her bat-like wings aiming at reviving her. According to ancient Indian philosophy the Bat represents entrance into internal darkness in order to change and rebirth. This duality is expressed also in the “Kiss of a Spider Woman” series, in which the spider weaves, casts a spell and pulls the cobweb of life. From the other hand weaving enables capturing and death. The image of the spider woman is a metaphor to the mother who is seeking to capture the male who hurt her daughter.

Debbie is not alone in the process, she initiated a social support campaign for “Noga into the Heart” exhibition, to jointly create a 3 meters long “Patches Blanket”, a quilt, made from tens of patches sawed together, each containing text and/or drawing made by Noga and by others who supported the campaign and sent their feedback. The collaborated blanket, together with the display of plastic puppets, hanging on red strings, represent a mutual trauma and also the power of healing of a group collaboration.

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