Ritual Artifact Creation: collaborative research + craft

In addition to making paintings for traditional exhibition, I also combine my ritual facilitation work and my painting practice to create painted ritual objects. This ritual object is a queer feminist ketubah-like document called a 'brit ahuvim.' My process for painting and calligraphing this artwork begins with extensive interviews of the two people getting married. In the hamsa example above, from Summer 2023, the two folks marrying shared collections of ancestral photographs with me. Our goal was to visually combined patterns from their Iraqi lineage (we chose architecture from the Iraq museum in Jerusalem) and Ashkenazi lineage (we chose a floral motif from a great great grandmother's lace table cloth). While not artwork I have yet exhibited, this multiethnic integration work through ritual artifact making has been an important part of my practice for that past seven years, and it's a chance for me to apply my traditional Jewish scribal arts (called sofrut) in a way that aligns with my politics and purpose as an artist.