Ayala Reznik

The representation of the female body in the Paleolithic and Neolithic aesthetic has become a topic of increasing interest to me in the past several years. Works such as the Venus of Willendorf constitute a source point or origin of the visual representation of the female body as it has evolved in our artistic, cultural, and historical traditions, as well as being, more generally, an original paradigm of the practice of sculpture as such, especially anthropomorphic sculpture. But in the body of this kind of work from the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras—that of female figurines—I see something else aside from the sources of artistic traditions and practices. I see the beginning of a conception of the female body in the field of perception, which is to say, in the domain that is concerned with how the female body is seen, by herself and by others, and has been seen throughout time. Therefore, the interest I had in these prehistoric forms of art eventually led me, as I focused on them more and more, to identify a profound and meaningful continuity between representations and self-representations of women’s bodies in those ancient times and representations of female bodies today. As I further explored this intriguing connection, I realized that one crucial intersection that can be found, between those early forms of female representations and female representations in a contemporary context, is in the theme of abuse, trauma, and self-rehabilitating of the victims of these fates. With this realization, I began developing this project as an exploration of the phenomenon of female abuse and its consequences applied to the sculpting of figurines—an artistic practice that has its roots in our early prehistory and carries on until today—to thus abridge, by means of the medium of sculpture, female subjects today with those from thousands of years ago, so that together they can speak to this same topic.

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