The Spell
Thirty-three consecutive prints, hung at different intervals, make up the spell, like a long sentence that is also a brief journey to the history of space and time. Shiree Rafaeli acts like an alchemist brewing a dark, bitter potion, concerning Time.
An ancient legend tells of a rebellious child and the Nursemaid of the Woods who owns a magic wheel. A turn on the wheel in one direction speeds the teeth of time forward, and the other turns time back. One direction ages us in one fell swoop, and the other takes us back to childhood. Rafaeli creates throughout the exhibition space a motion of eruption and convergence, explosion and bringing together. The wheel of the press compresses black ink into delicate paper, a thin, thirsty epidermis. Two persistent images emerge repeatedly, establishing themselves as archetypes: the water wheel and the nursemaid's hand. They soon become a set of instructions. One dictates the pace, the other – direction. I think about Rafaeli's exhibition as a deck of tarot cards, a mechanism of prediction and reconstruction. The Wheel of Fortune appears in the original deck.it is the card that invites us to take control of our fate, our life. Here, Rafaeli's wheel allows us to travel in time, to grow old or become young. Rafaeli is both the nursemaid and the punished child. She has control but is also a subject of the wheel's motion.
"O Slowly, Slowly Run, Horses of the Night" – a paradoxical command/plea, appears first in Ovid's collection of elegies, Amores, in one poem the protagonist wishes to buy some time with his mistress, same as Marlow's Faustus, who, knowing that his death is near, seeks one last hour among the living, before Lucifer carries him to Hell. Rafaeli's prints are the night horses' carriage. They gallop within the press, ejected one after the other, threatening to use up all the black ink, but at the same time they provide a deferment. They promise existence and continuity, and refuse to fade away.
The works in the exhibition contain two opposing forces: chaos and order, collapse and assembly. On the one hand, the exhibition is ordered and rhythmic, uniform and obedient, but on the other hand, it holds the forces of dismantling and destruction. It swings from the micro to the macro; divisions of microscopic cells become black holes and inter-galactic movements. The long sequence and the repetitive motion of forms work as a spell, a powerful, bewitching mantra.
Printmaking is, essentially, an act of repetition and recurrence. One source, many copies. The printing press may be viewed as the mechanism of culture. Unlike the painter, whose offspring are few and all different, the printmaking artist produces a multitude of similar ones. It is an art of repletion and multiplicity, possessing of a unique life force.
Yair Barak, curator
Shiree Rafaeli and Merav Shinn Ben-Alon in conversation
Shinn Ben-Alon: We are talking about a series of prints you made in the past year (2019-2020), which you titled The Spell. Can you tell me about this name?
Shiree Rafaeli: the name comes from a fairy tale called "the Nursemaid of the Woods" in the Hebrew version. It appeared in a fairy tale collection I had as a child. When I look at the book now, I am surprised that I've read these stories by myself. They were written in an archaic literary language. I found these fairy tales magical, in particular "the Nursemaid of the Woods." The story is about a girl called Pnina, who makes her parents so mad that during one of their fights the mother expresses an odd wish: "May the Nursemaid of the Woods come and take you with her." Instantly the door opens, the Nursemaid enters the room and takes Pnina to the woods. There, on the bank of a lake, is a flour mill. The Nursemaid of the Woods sets Pnina on the fast-turning wheel and utters a spell: "childhood to old age, old age to childhood." With each turn of the wheel, Pnina ages by three days, and when she gets off, she is "an old, wrinkled woman." The Nursemaid has another wheel, one that turns backward. At the end of the story, she uses it to revert Pnina to her childhood.
MSB: What attracted you again to this story at this point in your life?
SR: I happened upon the book after years of not opening it. The single illustration accompanying the story fascinated me, again. The first stage of the work was to make a drypoint etching on a copper plate based on this illustration, a classic technique that I don't use often. Two main images stood out from this initial work: the wheel and the Nursemaid's hand. In the illustration, the Nursemaid’s hand has a very long finger, which she points at the wheel, ordering it to turn as she recites the spell. At that time, I revisited Yaakov Shabtai's novel Past continuous (Zichron devarim). There's a constant motion of distancing and dissipating throughout this novel. Most of the characters die and disappear; they are all in the process of moving away from each other. I sensed that this was a reflection of a motion I recognize, which begins in a close-knit, tight place, a place where time is prolonged, and the people close to me are very close. But as time moves on, a gap widens between myself and those around me. It's a progression that starts out compact and taut and then dissipates gradually, hovers, and finally collapses inwardly. It has led me back to the wheel. MSB: So, this etching started a work process that has lasted a year and culminated in a series of prints. Tell me about what the work was like.
SR: I thought about a series right from the start. I was motivated to capture that sense of movement and sequence through a motionless dimension. I wanted to make a move that acts in several dimensions: forward and backward, inward and outward, something that has a beginning and an end, but it is not clear whether it stops at the end or starts in the beginning. I wanted the work to have direction, order, and rhythm, meaning that the complete installation would embody a wheel and the spins around a wheel.
MSB: in the idiom of the folk tale, you might say that 'Pnina has lived her whole life' through these spins.
SR: Right. In fact, this is a zoom-in on the wheel's motion, examining its essence as it is rooted in my inner perception.
MSB. How is that related to printmaking?
SR: printmaking is inherently repetitive. The repetitions are not identical but rather similar and different, ever evolving. The plate I work on does not contain the completed image; it becomes a foundation for a variety of consecutive actions performed with the press. Each time the press prints a new version, there is a sense of surprise. Throughout the process, there's a constant struggle between my will and the will of the process. Though it is chaotic, it comes out in an orderly manner.
MSB: what do you mean by 'an orderly manner?' That it has regularity?
SR: there's an essential regularity that I set for myself in the very decision to use a certain paper, for instance, or the same shade of ink. But there's a regularity that's inherent to working with a press.
Since I make the changes in a sequence, you can identify the consecutive prints and their gradual changes. This method allows me to play with conceptual building blocks, which is what makes the method interesting for me.
MSB: I see a direct connection between the movement of the wheel in the Nursemaid of the Woods and the motion of the press, and further yet, to the image of the press's wheel rotating in both directions, back and forth. Surprisingly, you have two presses here in the studio.
SR: Yes… I see now that I might have gone far, all the way to the childhood story, to discover the most obvious thing right in front of me in the studio: the wheel of the press. What I'm finding out now, with your help, is that I am not only the little girl under a spell but also the Nursemaid who casts it.
MSB: your path is a wheel in itself. In this past year, when you were working on the series, the pandemic struck. How did that impact the course of the work?
SR: in March, at the start of the first lockdown, about ten prints from the series were already completed. I recall looking at them in the studio, and they seemed to be related to the biological catastrophe that had landed upon us. Then I froze and shut myself down at home. I found a transparency, a needle, and some threads and began embroidering, making a needlepoint plate. On it, I made two images: the Nursemaid's hand and needlepoint wheels. When the first lockdown ended, I made a series of prints from this embroidered plate, which became the second part of the work on the series. The second lockdown also paralyzed me, and this time, when I returned to the studio, I couldn't recreate the flow of the series from the place where I had left it. I began to play with animation clips, and through this process, in a completely different direction, I re- found the way to continue the series.
MSB: animation (from the Latin anima, soul) is the act of bestowing life on an inanimate object through motion. In the animation I also find the circular movement and the transformations that preoccupy you . Actually, it is a metaphoric wheel. You connect the act and its content, the wheel's turning that stands for the flow of human life from childhood to old age, and then, inspired by the Nursemaid, you activate the creative mechanism and reverse the wheel's turns, from old age to childhood. As soon as you realized that you were both the Nursemaid of the Woods and the child, the wheel became a metaphor and a creative tool related to your work process's materiality. You don't just outline the wheel or the hand that propels it; you wish to linger in the space between beginning and end. On the one hand, you talk about time, and on the other hand, you create a magical situation outside of time.