MA
Ma is a series of drawings that are a palimpsest of Laufer’s four-year-old daughter's drawings. Tracing the transition from abstract gestures to a more generic figuration and delving into the visual vocabulary of an infant, Atalya has drawn, scaled up or down, redrawn, carefully cut, twisted around, collaged and drawn again motifs such as flowers, rainbows, houses and dinner tables with unicorn cakes, pasta and peas. This rather elaborate process, slows down the act of image-making and and transforms the swift gestures into more complex versions of themselves.
Ma is a word play bringing three very different words together: Ma for Mother and Mama. Then Ma for the questioning word in Hebrew, that can be translated as what, why or how much. Lastly, Ma is the name for a Japanese concept of in-between space, which refers to the compositional distance between elements in a drawing, as well as to a physical or an emotional space between people. And so, this work questions the symbiotic relationship between mother and child - the possibilities and boundaries and explores proximity and distance on different levels. Using her daughter’s drawings as a departure point, Atalya seemingly enters the inner world of a child, but actually probes her own inner logic.
