Along my Jewish matrilineal line, the story of my people that I’ve inherited goes like this…

…A long, long time ago our ancestors were promised a homeland from the divine. After generations as a pastoral, nomadic people, then generations of enslaved in Egypt we eventually escaped from physical enslavement and wandered for 40-years (or a generation) in the desert in order to become mentally and spiritually free. When we finally encountered our promised homeland, we found other peoples were living there. We were instructed by the divine to wage wars on those people and claim our homeland for ourselves, where we became settled agriculturalists…

The yearning for home continues today. Is it not universal to know we belong to a place, to live amongst the buried bones of our ancient ancestors? To know unequivocally that there is a place in this vast universe that claims us as theirs?

…After many years living in our promised homeland with periods of success and failures at ruling the land, we were eventually expelled nearly entirely. When our most sacred space - the temple - fell so did priestly Judaism and with it the embodied practices of animal sacrifice, tithing of food crops, and rhythms of pilgrimage. We also lost our connection to the land we conceptualized as our divine home.

Today the questions of homeland, Indigeneity, belonging and intimately knowing a place tug at me. What if I wanted to “go home?” What if I wanted to return to the place my ancient ancestors called home, where layers of their existence permeate the air? After 2,000 years my people have returned and are the sovereign rulers and yet they’ve paid a heavy price in order to do so. In order to return to & rule the place that my people are Indigenous to, that so many people are Indigenous to, we’ve had to contort into the form of our oppressors - into settler-colonists. We’ve had to use the tools and rely on the power of Western European Imperial Christendom.

…We spread out to the many corners of the world were we were guests, not meant to make home, but to wait until our divine homeland was ready to embrace us once again.

My art seeks to speak to these incommensurable tensions. In my jewelry I re-imagine how the feminine temple priestess and the genderqueer temple priestexx may have adorned themselves. These figures were exiled in the time of the temple and lived on the margins, in the shadows, in secret shrines along the pilgrimage routes. How can honoring them through embodying them bring life and healing to our own ancient past?

In my tapestry weaving, I find my hands most often create images of desert mountain ranges or temperate forest mountain ranges. The desert I associate with wandering, desolation, the Negev, and the Ballarat. The temperate forests I associate with the land where I was raised in Nisenan-Mewuk territory, abundance, quietness & familiarity. Are my hands seeking to reconcile these two “homelands” through feeling the curves of their similarities?

My linocut prints are most often inspired by specific places here in diaspora. In noticing leaves of seven species of trees in the land where I grew up, granite boulders along the Tuolumne river, young deer in mating season, fennel and red-winged black birds along the bay am I seeking to describe this place, the contours, the feeling it evokes as a way of showing my gratitude, as an offering?