Iris incorporates video and slide projections of ocean waves, salt crystals and women looking back, sound recordings and mixes of vowel meditations and women's voicing of their own personal stories along with several tons of salt. This work was originally created as an artist-in-residence project and exhibition at the Koffler Centre for the Arts (Toronto) in collaboration with Wende Bartley and Naomi Kahane along with the participation of Suzanne Alexanian, Joceline Chabot, Siblylle Preuscaht, Gin Bergeron, Mimi Yano and Loretta Bailey and bh yael (who videotaped the initial footage of the waves). The Sweeney Art Gallery of the University of California, Riverside and The Littman Gallery at the University of Portland, Oregon presented re-worked and somewhat different versions of Iris.

 

"The ocean is perhaps only a grain of salt in distress
that all the water in the world has answered."
Edmond Jabès from The Book of Resemblences

 

The work offers some re-interpretations of the biblical story of Lot's wife, while questioning the nature of imposed authority; the continuum between personal and social experience and witnessing of trauma, women as choicemakers and the interrelationship between creative and healing energies.

Reflected in this work are some of Judith Herman's theories as articulated in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence -- from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Herman suggests that the progression from a traumatic event to healing develops in three stages: safety, remembering and mourning, and reconnection and commonality. Other influences include, but are not limited to, conversations with Sonia Zylberberg on contemporary feminist Judaic interpretations of the 'voice' of biblical women, Aryeh Kaplan's Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and Practice, Ted Andrew's Sacred Sound: Transformation through Music and Word, and Margaret Visser's work on the rituals of food and dining.