Artist Statement:
I am a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, drawing, painting, photography, etching, video, and collaborative performance. For more than three decades, I have explored the idea of Home - not simply as a physical place, but as a space shaped by memory, identity, relationships, and lived experience.
Home is where we seek shelter and belonging, but it can also be a place of restriction, expectation, and confinement. I am interested in the gap between the home we imagine and the one we inhabit, between our private world and the social structures that shape our lives.
In "Elementary Particle" (2012), this relationship between home and protection emerges through the image of a porcupine that senses danger and shields itself with its spines. I see it as a metaphor for the home itself: a shelter that offers security while potentially becoming a defensive structure, closed off from the outside world.
Many of my works draw on architectural forms and environments reminiscent of construction sites, abandoned factories, military camps, and anonymous residential buildings. I am attracted to places that seem left behind, yet retain traces of human presence. Through architectural fragments, facades, and familiar structures, I explore how our surroundings influence our identities and shape the ways we inhabit the world.
The relationship between domestic life and creative freedom has been particularly important to me as a woman and an artist. I often reflect on the distance between the suburban home and the artist's studio, between everyday responsibilities and the desire for a space of one's own. These worlds constantly intersect: home can be both a source of inspiration and a place that limits freedom.
Women frequently appear in my work as wandering figures, moving through unfamiliar environments or occupying abandoned spaces. They may seem vulnerable or displaced, yet possess a quiet determination. Rather than dominating their surroundings, they find ways to inhabit and transform them, gradually reclaiming space and creating a sense of belonging.
In my exhibition "FE male" in Santa Barbara (2018), I explored these ideas through the recurring figure of the Iron Woman. Made of iron, she embodies the tension between strength and vulnerability - a woman who has developed an armor against the world while remaining exposed beneath it.
Throughout my practice, I return to questions of presence and absence, memory and forgetting, belonging and displacement. I seek to give form to what is not always visible: the memories embedded in places, the lives suggested by abandoned spaces, and the personal stories behind familiar structures.
My work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy, and is included in public and private collections.
Hila Laiser Beja, 2026
