Som Chai meets my family & friends
I am so excited that Som Chai is now in Oz and has been granted a partner visa.
He's met my family and friends, and even come along to Uni with me.
It is wonderful having him here with me - no more lonely nights or awkward outings on my own!
I can throw my wish list in the fire now because he fulfils all my dreams. I am so proud of him - he is charismatic, generous and kind, and he is also Budhist and a meditator!
I wondered whether there was a difference between art made by a human and art made by a machine? So I made a fan that painted, and I became a painting human fan.
Conclusion: there was no difference.
Just an Ordinary Peasant is based on my uncle’s experience as an inmate at Treblinka extermination camp in 1944. His memoir recounts that while being forced to carry corpses from the gas chambers to an open-air pyre, he was handed a sack which held little children who were still alive. The guard commanded the sack be thrown into the fire. The woman I play in Just an Ordinary Peasant is a hybrid character created from the memoirs of my uncle, my parents and my own research. She sings and dances and also throws a sack of babies into the fire. This piece explores my own biases as well as questions the culpability of ‘ordinary people’ who were accomplices to the atrocities carried out during the Third Reich.
Behind the scenes in a Yemenite village
1984 - 1992
In the early 1980s, I moved to Israel with my husband Ronny and our two young children.
After spending a year and a half in an absorption centre, we were still unsure where to live. One day we found ourselves driving through a backwaters Yemenite village, half an hour outside Jerusalem.
My eyes were wide open trying to absorb everything – the women with colourful scarves on their heads, squatting next to large tubs in the front gardens, plucking chickens. Kids of all ages playing games with sticks and stones or riding their pet donkeys or sheep. Men gathered in groups sipping Turkish coffee, chewing a leaf called gat, and nibbling on pumpkin seeds. How different this world was to the one I had left behind.
Ronny and I decided to stay in this village for a few months. At least then we would have some time to think about our next move. At first life seemed very surreal and poles different to suburban life in Melbourne. But the people were welcoming and hospitable which helped us adjust, and those initial few months stretched into eight years.