Slide Images

1 - Lehav, 1993 – 2013 (detail)

2 - Lehav, 1993 – 2013

Lehav, 1997 – 2013

I do not start out with an idea, but explore possibilities. I have been thinking about light for a long time. One night when I could not sleep, I went to my studio with a long electrical cord and a light bulb and started to explore possibilities of shadows, reflections, refractions and projections. Many nights followed as new discoveries revealed themselves.

In Lehav, light directed into a mirror reflects up to a glass sphere partly filled with water; the water and glass focus the light into a bright point on the wall.

While light and shadow are ephemeral, once they are imprinted in the mind’s eye, they assume their own existence.

I was installing Lehav for the first time in Gallery 312 in Chicago when a tragic announcement was made that Yitzchak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel was assassinated. I dedicated the work “For Yitzchak Rabin and for Peace”.

“Safdie memorializes Rabin not in a physical monument but in light directed through water. The mystery of being human her sculptures seem to say cannot be reduced to any physical thing – one must seek that mystery in the realm beyond objects.”

   - Fred Camper, Between Chaos and Order, Chicago Reader, Dec 8, 1994