Haya Cohen is an arts practitioner that expresses and experiments with versatile mediums, including working with living art. After immigrating to Australia with her family, in 1997, she worked as a gemologist. Later, Haya added academic studies to her busy life. She completed her PhD in visual arts and cultural industries at Griffith University, Australia. As an arts practitioner, Haya’s main focus is on the continual processes of material thinking and thinking through materials and the relationships between body/self/environment. Her work draws from interdisciplinary areas focusing on intersections between philosophy, biology, cognitive science, anthropology and art. Haya has exhibited internationally and across Australia and published academic papers in interdisciplinary journals and books. Her teaching experience includes Griffith University and Queensland College of Art.
In recent years Haya experiments with printmaking. Her interest in exploring materials and connecting lines of thought are brought through her etchings, linocuts and much more.
COCOONING
Cocooning is comprised of a series of “sketches” in which I knit myself to objects, becoming wrapped in red threads, forming a cocoon in different locations—a corner of a street, a front yard of an art institution or a shop front. Rather than deciding in advance of choosing/pairing a specific place with a specific audience I have chosen the locations arbitrarily. Each “sketch” was positioned as an interference with the mundane everyday environment rather than as an event that aims to become the focus for attention or attempts to attract a bigger number of people.
My performance moves between street art—yarn bombing—and street performance but at the same time is not tightly defined as either. It is a performance that is ephemeral in which I leave nothing behind but memories and experience. I seek to connect and reveal the quality of intimacy that is woven into the fabric of relations through the experience of the audience and the performer in a third space —the interval.
The interval is a space that is opened for an optional conversation between the performer and the audience, where the experience of the audience is not considered as a goal, but becomes a contributor to the sensation and dynamics of the performance. Within a fraction of time, connections that also lead to an active decision process can be made. These connections can include an intimate moment that is taken further to become a continuous reaction, by both/or either by the audience and the performer—they become Momentums of Intimacy.
