To bring you my love
My name is Ayala Tal, and I am a multidisciplinary artist exploring the human bond with nature and with realms not visible to the eye—places where animals dwell and where allegorical and emotional worlds resound. Through self-directed botanical research, in which I study the characteristics of each plant, I build and weave botany into visual worlds through digital collage, illustration, and sculpture.
I grew up in Motza, and as a child I wandered barefoot in the forests of the Jerusalem hills, feeling the pine needles under my feet and speaking with the trees and the creatures that live there. The forest was a sanctuary, full of life. I learned how to look at nature from my grandmother, a Righteous Among the Nations, who in practice raised me in her garden in Motza. She impressed upon me the sense of protection she herself experienced under the Nazi regime in the forests of the Netherlands, when for three years she hid Jews during the Holocaust in the attic of a small wooden cabin deep in a forest in Wassenaar. The forest’s protective power—for those survivors and for my grandmother—was passed down to me as an intergenerational transmission of memory, attention, and learning.
About six years ago I began to study and practice shamanism. I connected with the strong feminine figures within tribal societies who live close to the earth and know how to listen to the messages of animals and plants. That listening sharpened my sense of connection to the various beings that live in nature—beings that are both physical and beyond ordinary human perception. In my work I often engage with these relationships, between the plant world and the beings that dwell in and around it.
Nature opens a threshold to another reality—a protected, magical world. This sense of protection is something I seek. Since October 7, I have been building bird nests made of olive branches and crystals—floating mobiles that serve as a shelter and a place of refuge through wood and light. The nest becomes a mobile, capable of movement that protects and guards where the concrete of the shelter fails to repel. The mobile is also a childlike act: creating from gathered materials to imagine another way, where light refracted through crystals becomes a kind of magic that envelops the body and shields against the violent weaponry of human beings.
On the most recent Memorial Day I drove to Canada Park (Ayalon–Canada Park) to gather resins and strength from the forest. Clouds of smoke and wildfire blocked the road already before Sha’ar HaGai, burning my heart and choking me with the smoke that devoured the forest and its small creatures. Over the three weeks that followed I returned to the forest to hang the mobiles on the trees so they would scatter glimmers of light and give the forest joy and strength. I felt as if I had come to comfort someone sitting shivah. I wanted the forest to feel my love, to heal. In doing so I realized that a reciprocal process was at work: I, too, am in healing; all of us here together are in a story of post-traumatic growth—humans, animals, and plants.
From the ash and the warped, boiling earth I saw fresh shoots emerge, bramble leaves, and the seeds of pines and cypresses waiting for the rain to germinate. The forest is wiser than we are, and the soil knows how to heal itself—yet our efforts to help also matter.
