multidisciplinary artist
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Scars

“Scars” is a body of work that explores the ideas of beauty on the other side of trauma, how we as humans deal with personal and cultural traumatic events and how we choose to frame them as time goes on.

This work evolved out of an intersection of my artistic practice having themes of how cultures imprint their emotions and beliefs on their physical spaces/communities,and a traumatic personal event that I was working through.

This is the result, a metaphor of beauty out of trauma abstracting the wounds left on Berlin’s building from WWII and the East-West divide. The gashes, bullet holes and bomb blasts left to remind the population of a history not to be repeated again, to not be forgotten, to open a dialogue towards discussion and healing. This resonated with me, the way forward is not to forget but to address, incorporate and honor those moments in life as well as in community.

Choosing to focus closely on these marks left behind changes them into beautiful, almost painterly images until you realize what they are and then you must think about the duality of beauty and pain. This intrinsically human dichotomy is part of the human existence of life; it is in our choices of how to look at it that is the key to dealing with trauma in our lives.

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   Printed images are archival ink prints on mulberry paper. Works are editioned and available at various print sizes.

A special edition folio of 8 pre-selected images is available as an edition of 20 with 2 AP. (folio image size 10"x13")

Creative Commons License
This work by Tamara Rafkin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.