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.
MENDING KERALA
The venue for my residency, vibrant and contrasting landscapes of Kerala, India, provide stimulation for my work Mending Kerala. Stitching together pieces of fabric dyed with spices such as turmeric, saffron and chili, patterned with both the majestic and the ordinary, integrate deep-seated cultural traditions with the contemporary. I tell a story of a place where traditions and values clash yet co-exist, where cultures overlap, bleed into one another. The resultant quilt derives an evocative power not only from its aesthetic façade, scents and textures, but also from the intimate reflections, written on the supporting papers stitched onto each piece of the quilt to reveal a disturbance of direction.
I utilize Mending Kerala to map cross-stitchings between cultures, necessary for me to organise the stream of events that are now memories. If memory is happening while the brain ties the sights, smells, sounds, own impressions of a place, together into relationship, then the event becomes a blend of memory and live-experience at once—a disturbed direction. Memories become a quilt of repetitive fragments and repetitive practice followed by processes of self-organisation.
A combination of multiple practices, both contemporary and traditional, such as tapestry, weaving, embroidery, dying, Linoprinting and bandhini suggest (rather than represent) an option for temporary organization. Sections of my daily diary are stitched, not necessarily in chronological order, to augment a story that sometimes contradicts the aesthetic supposition.
I utilise material processes in order to comprehend processes of identity construction, especially realising the process of immigration – being there and here and there again.
