“Forest peace for him is inner peace. It is an inner state.”
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Orna Mintz is an artist and craftsperson who wood is second nature to her. Her encounter with wood is like a shamanic journey, an encounter with the spirit that protects her and provides a source of inspiration healing and strength. As part of a daily practice and through continuous years of practicing her skills, she breathes suppleness into the material, until it transforms into a kind of an internal vocabulary. Its spirit surfaces her dreams, animating the hidden forms that reside within her imagination. This reciprocal act of creation liberates the wood from its fixed form, rooted in solid ground, and actualizes it as a dream-like entity, ethereal entity.
In her dreaming and waking stage, Orna draws brush strokes of wood as if they were brush strokes of ink. She forms delicate and fragile sentences that emerge into large-scale structures. Multiform and dynamic, the wood sways and shifts, curving and twisting like a melody. Orna balances weights in a kind of choreography, composing a score for a living jazz performance within the material. The wood shifts and palpitates through a multitude of rhythms, in a complex and unorthodox manner, disrupting harmonic principles.
The square, rigid gallery space becomes a creative field from which emerges a lyrical arrangement punctuated by rhythmic tension. Heavy wood hovers in mid-air like a weightless mass. Soft forms conceal strenuous physical effort. Improvised, surprising shapes accentuate motion that dismantle the established patterns. Repeated motifs are disrupted by syncopation: the pattern is disrupted, the sound falls silent or is delayed, leaving a void space. The space pulsates, breaths, awakens and comes to life.
Mintz conducts this complexity through the fingers of her imagination, stretching rough threads between the wood’s compliance and resistance. She ties and unties, emerges and disappears, fragments the whole into segments and then reconnects them. In the cosmic swing she assembles, the wood stirs the surrounding air, sculpting the space with its presence. This is an intimate yet potent performance in wood, a dialogue between the spirit that creates and the spirit that creates her.