LandEscape Art Review, Special Edition

Noga Cohen

Noga Cohen works in sculpture, installation, and mixed media art to navigate through psychological and existential themes of perilousness and protection. Her work draws a line between temporality, decay, and preservation, and addresses the relationship between the human body and trauma. Her practice is pushing the limits of found materials and exploring natural processes of decomposition and putrefaction through nontraditional sculptural techniques. She collects everyday objects, furniture, plastic waste, and industrial materials used in house constructions, manipulates them by using methods of deconstruction and rebuilding, to investigate their inherent qualities. In her sculptural process, she stacks, hangs, breaks, tears, wraps, stuffs, uses heat, time, and gravity, to construct objects that reveal anthropomorphic elements. Her work contextualizes different aspects of violence, destruction, and precariousness. It offers a critical political point of view of the ways the human body is perceived, utilized, and valued in the current time. Her work highlights wounded bodily textures and forms as physical manifestations of trauma. She reconstructs fragmented residues, accumulated marks, scars, and traces, to explore concepts of mortality and loss.