Adama Adam Dam
This painting is a meditation on change, memory, and the impossibility of return. The central figure curls into herself in a foetal position, surrounded by the tiled floor of a childhood once lived and now unreachable. Her body, tender and bruised, speaks of grief—an inward collapse in the face of loss, of innocence shattered.

The patterned tiles beneath her were designed by the artist and hold fragments of her early life growing up on a kibbutz in Israel. Each one becomes a vessel for memory: a fig tree, a bomb shelter, a bread slicer, a water tower. These symbols, once mundane or magical through the eyes of a child, now carry the weight of permanence and absence—especially in the wake of the events of October 7th, when the kibbutz was transformed into an army base. The painting becomes not only a lament for a place but for a version of self that can no longer return.

Scattered flower petals—gathered from plants native to the region—represent moments suspended in time. Smell, colour, sound. Fragments of joy, fragments of war. They fall across the surface like memories trying to settle. And yet, nothing feels still.

At its heart, Adama is about rupture. The moment when the illusion of permanence breaks. It is about war not as spectacle, but as something that reaches into the most intimate corners of identity—turning the familiar into something foreign, and the past into something unreachable. A portrait of a body remembering what the mind cannot yet bear.