art beat / By Katherine Almy

Shredding, Wrapping, Knotting

Exploring the potential of fabric with Yael Bentovim

(Jan. 24, 2008)  It seems to me that there are generalists and there are specialists. I’ve always been a generalist — I’m interested in so many things that I’ve never taken the time to get really good at anything. My life is a litany of unfinished projects and grandiose dreams that never come to fruition. It’s frustrating at times, but it doesn’t bother me so much that I’m willing to give up the kick I get out of learning a little bit about lots of things.

However, I do sometimes envy the specialist who spends a lifetime driven by a particular passion, perfects an art form and spends all of their time with it, completing hundreds of projects. I have to create a special category for the artist I met last weekend though — that of general specialist.

Artwork by yael bentovim is on display at the arcata marsh interpretive center. Courtesy of the artist.

GALLERY >

Yael Bentovim has worked with fiber all of her life, but the way that she works with it has metamorphosed over the years. Asked where the interest came from, she talks about the fact that she’d learned to crochet when she was three years old. She grew up in Israel in the ‘50s, not an easy place to be at that time, and needlework was a satisfying escape.

When she came to the United States to study art, she discovered fiber art and stuck with it, receiving her MA in Environmental Fiber Art. “My graduate show consisted of several large room-size fiber constructed environments,” she says. “I used crochet, weaving, wrapping and knotting. Looking back I marvel at the youthful energy and enthusiasm that empowered me to create such massive constructions.”

She worked principally with a loom, and then one day found that she’d lost interest. “No one told me that someday I might not want to do this anymore,” she says. It was a difficult time for her, but the result was that she moved on to invent her own method of using fiber.

Weaving is labor-intensive, tedious and has its limits. While a good weaver can achieve a lot of painterly effects, you have to do so according to the parameters that the loom sets for you. It’s a marvelous art form, but one can also see why Yael wanted to break free of those confines.

“I devised a technique of shredding raw sisal and then dying it with bright colors,” she says. Using the bits of dyed sisal, she finds she can work more directly, in effect “painting” with the fiber.

Her technique is not better, just different and better suited to her way of working. Her work is to weaving what Seurat’s pointillism was to traditional brush stroke painting. And although it still involves a lot of preparation, it allows her to get to the creating process a lot more directly.

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