Tamari lived and worked for a period of several years in China. The sculpture presented in this exhibition – which may read as either a sailboat or a swan – is composed of photographs she took at the ice festival in the city of Harbin on the Russian border, not far from Siberia. This festival features monumental sculptures and impressive structures created entirely out of ice.

Upon her return to Israel, the artist began working with the materials she gathered in the course of her sojourn in China and arbitrarily cut up the photographs, exchanging one initial set of impressions for another. She wove these cutout photographs together solely by cutting and folding them, while enabling the material to shape her experience.

Memories of the ice festival, which the artist documented in the course of one journey, were transformed into a bird and later into the great Romantic theme of the shipwreck. Sunken ships are associated with new discoveries, journeys, and adventures, as well as with powerful natural forces and dangers. In addition to appealing to the bourgeois imagination, this theme has served as a metaphor for the tumult experienced by the human soul as it struggles to overcome various crises.

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