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Dalia Ayalon Sinclair - Artist's Statement
The tree sprouting its leaves is the great mediator rising between heaven and earth; communicating between space and time; between stability and endless movement. The tree is vital, protects, aids and benefits, embodying conflicts of life and death, growth and withering, immunity and naked vulnerability, rigidity and softness, nourishment and dependency, therefore naturally identified with man and his continuous impact on the environment.
Leaves, like people, possess beauty, poetry, mysticism, yearning and dreams. They are a testimony to the time, flowing from day to night, light to darkness, the play of foliage between sun and shade to endless metamorphoses - impossible to define.
As leaves detach from their branches, so was I, wandering between Israel and Australia - borne and transferred, reaching crossroads; experiencing the void and the longing; the here and now, past and future - the cycle of life.
I was born in Israel to Holocaust survivors who were uprooted from their homes, experienced loss of family members, survived Auschwitz and met in the death camp of Bergen-Belsen. They were among the first to arrive in Palestine on a refugee vessel to face yet another war, the struggle for the establishment of the State of Israel.
It was during a trip to Budapest that the subject of leaves captivated me. Thunderstruck by the Holocaust Memorial, a Weeping Willow tree densely covered with tiny silver metal leaves, each of those inscribed with a name of a person “born and vanished”, I internalized the emotions evoked in me which were later expressed in my art work where each leaf carries the image of man.
The leaves’ range of color and texture is a dominant visual expression in the paintings, photography and videos. In the paintings, the acrylic paint is spread onto the canvas in short rhythmic movements, densely filling the format as if wanting to burst outwards and grow endlessly. In other works, the leaves are smoothed onto the surface in multiple layers of structured stains as though engaged in an act of revealing and concealing.
In the close up photography I freeze the moment before the leaves disperse and move on to another space where they are influenced by other elements in nature and enter into play of light and shadow.
The video works not only reveal the colors of the leaves but also the melodious whisper when taking off into space and the crackling sound when crushed by our feet – unable to grasp the beauty down under.
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