Creating out of not knowing: Maya Gelfman at TEDxTelAvivWomen
[Music] so I've been walking about my lecture about my talk sorry for today and I've been writing and rewriting my sentences I've tried to make them funny and I've tried to make them smart and to think about the perfect beginning and then I realized that I've been spending all my time and energy on trying to remember and pronounce correctly in this language english and the only thing I wanted to do is to come here and to tell you of how i created my new solo exhibition as a kind of an experiment and the name of the experiment was creating out of love knowing so i decided to practice what I preached creative to not knowing is venturing in a journey without having a map and just letting my intuition lead the way so this is what I'm doing now yesterday I throw away all my notes all my planning's and I'm just creating this talk on the fly out of not knowing so this is how the story goes in my last solo exhibition a gallery owner came to me and told me at the end of 2013 I want to exhibit your new solo exhibition and I took her words literally and decided to create something completely new that for me meant that I wanted to surprise myself and I wanted to challenge myself and I wanted my artistic process to reflect that feeling of something that I don't know that can be anything it's like endless potential and possibilities and then I thought about it what does it mean because my artistic process is the longings different thing my works take months to complete a use a unique mix mega technique that can take days and hours like tying for five-month 300,000 wolf strings one by one or making two thousand tiny holes in a sheet of paper so it can become pretty monotonous a time so I was thinking I wanted something new which meant new ideas fresh feelings and endless options near by definition is something I haven't met yet so I can't expect to know in advance which meant I can't go running ahead in my mind and imagining the final image and I shouldn't plan or analyze every step fresh means nothing like I did before content look and can feel like something that I've done already so I just needed to stay in the present an interception was supposed to reveal themselves along the way guided by intuition so I thought about it some more the only question was how how do I make a long process and make and still make every moment meaningful how do i maintain an attention without the or trying to control it and the question I found the answer I found was a simple and natural I have a toolbox I could try and use my senses so let's start with the sense of touch while drawing a really 20 play attention to the filling of the pencil between my fingers or the texture of the paper under my arm and how about the floor beneath my bare feet when I'm doing embroidery on my papers I'm literally walking around in half a circle around this sheet of paper pushing the layoffs on one side and pull it from the from the other again and again or hearing I've noticed that all the sounds that the ones that I am making and the ones that come from the inside connecting to a rhythmic tune that I can try and keep in tune with and this way I could hear what was going on every moment here and now and then there is sight when I draw I moved back and forth between focus and the focus from large very composition two small sharp details and I've noticed but the light and shadows are playing a similar game on the all during the passing of the day and then every once in a while I remember to close my eyes just for a moment and every time I open them and look back at my painting I saw it a little differently with new eyes and its freshen up my point of view and then I was using smell and taste to evoke long lost memories or strong reactions such a nostalgia I'm fear and they think that I realized was that I all these things I that are within me and around me I feel an experience anyway I'm just not used to actively directing my attention to it on the contrary when I'm trying to be serious and concentrate it's usually coming with his frown serious I'm like fitting them as if they were destruction the white noise and I'm trying to filter them out but these were the things that were making my attention authentic and it was making my experience and ever-changing one rather than a repetitive one and this change became a part of my creation so two weeks ago my exhibition opened and I had a moment of closure I was walking around in the gallery space i was looking at the works hanging peacefully on the gallery walls and i could see the exhibition for what it was which was a complete cycle 11 paintings and one installation that worked for themselves stood up for themselves but also combined together to create a bigger picture and the whole idea and it was very exciting and of course i was surprised but i think that the one thing that i took the most from this process and this is the white why did I did it did they do it in this way was that these were exactly the moments where I felt most true to myself when I was afraid of the unknown but willing to go with my gut feeling and to trust my intuition that they know which way to go and I learned something new about myself like an ability I did nothing have or something new about the subject i'm dealing with or even if i just learned a new way to look at something familiar and not experiencing it in an automatic way and i think that it made my process and actually my whole life much more interesting and this is the point we came here not just but to have fun and I do believe that as long as I'm willing to let that randomness in I'm facing countless new possibilities [Applause] [Music]