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.
TEXTILED BECOMINGS
Textiled Becomings: Making From Scratch
Textiled Becomings: Making From Scratch is the creative component of my doctoral project.
The works presented in this exhibition explore the ways in which cultural, social and environmental forces are intertwined in the creative process and are reflected through specific materials and embodied performative activities. The woven pieces are living textiles, made “from scratch”— the cotton is grown from seeds to make yarn, the hand-spun yarn is implanted with barley seeds and the seeded yarn is woven using my body as a loom. No tools are involved and some of the woven pieces take the shape of the space between the limbs of my body and others take the shape of the space between my limbs and those of another person, which form the loom.
The aim of the works in this exhibition is to produce a viewfinder for the audience to be aware of the movements of this research which focuses on finding media for meditative and communicative ways to understand one’s nomadic subjectivity. In this way, the work no longer functions as a representation of, or comment on cultural or social values, becoming instead a form of social relation. I have installed the pieces to enable viewers to imagine and potentially feel how the woven pieces were made on my body. If a person were to be standing across from someone on the other side of the hanging woven piece, they would be able to visually connect the woven piece with the part of the body used as a loom and map the weaving back on to his or her body. Documentation (video and didactic panels and growing cotton photo album are provided to indicate the painstaking process of implanting seed by seed, rolling the yarns and weaving, give a time lapse view of the life cycle of the implanted seeds and emphasise the maternal relationship I have with the vibrant, living materials.
