of protection and confinement
Carmel Dudley's oil paintings explore the symbol of the tent as a way to peer into a liminal space – a seam between certainty and doubt, clarity and ambiguity, safety and danger.
Carmel Dudley lives in Haifa. She is a painter and a scientist-in-training, and is active in Jewish-Palestinian solidarity and anti-occupation groups. You can find her on instagram at @carmel.qp and her paintings at https://www.carmelrd.xyz/
A tent is a temporary shelter that aims to meet our basic needs: privacy, comfort, protection from the elements. But only thin fabric, pulled taut by poles or cords, separates the inside from the outside world. Though the structure is staked to the ground, it can fill with wind and blow away. Flimsy walls don’t block menacing noises yet conceal their source, and the confined quarters can impose suffocating intimacy. Refuge, or prison? The threshold of a tent becomes a border crossing of escape, from within or without.
These paintings were made last winter. I was drawn to tents by the peculiar way they refract light and by their emotive contradictions – in particular, the duality of protection and confinement. Now, in war, where perhaps nothing is (only) as it seems, this excruciating duality seems to ripple through the fabric of our opposing national myths. What’s more, in this war the image of the tent splinters into divergent, incompatible symbols for each kind of searing pain: death and displacement, violated innocence, patriotic sacrifice, abandonment to one’s fate…
I wonder: does my moral compass, trustworthy and true in my own small life, function correctly on this geopolitical scale? Pain may be an inseparable part of the human condition, but I remain stubbornly convinced that this much pain is not. Tens of thousands of human beings have been killed, and yet we continue, confined by false dichotomies that claim to protect. Destroy, or be destroyed. Us, or them. The lives lost cannot be restored, but if we decide to view our futures as interwoven, I think it's still possible to chart a course to a shared, just, and peaceful life on this land. Not by accident or by destiny, but by choice.
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