Introduction by Davida Pines
As We Are represents the work that emerged from warm, free-flowing, and deeply generous conversations held on alternate Sundays over Zoom during the lockdown.
We, four Jewish women from the UK and the US, came together to consider what it means to study the self during a time of unusual and uncanny quiet; to claim the space necessary to draw self-portraits while home-schooling a very young child or caring for ageing and fragile parents; to observe, with curiosity and suspended judgement, our own increasingly un-coiffed and un-curated external selves; to consider the face coverings that we were learning to tie on and the masks that we were working to take off.
The work of this group has been to notice what happens when we stop trying to arrange ourselves in a particular way; stop striving to say or do the right or expected thing; stop trying to stay within the lines. Our goal is now to see ourselves fully, deeply, carefully, specifically. As we are.
