Sasportas does not attempt to maintain a consistent perspective in her drawings and in many it appears as if the lines of perspective have been inverted. Such ideas of reflection and refraction are central to an understanding of her work and stretch back to early exhibitions such as The Carpenter and the Seamstress, shown first as a monumental installation at Deitch Projects,New York, in 2001.The installation, named for her father (The Carpenter) and her mother (The Seamstress) appeared as a psychobiography that spliced personal with national narratives. Sasportas explored her childhood growing up in anonymous immigration towns in Israel, her desire for autonomy and desire to play a role in a wider, less parochial society.Vast MDF panels in muted shades of umber, blue, red and orange climbed the walls of the gallery and flowed along the floor. Blocks of colour and abstract motifs were superimposed upon an architectural ‘floor-plan’ of the block of flats in which she was raised and represented a personal narrative of independence and familial control yet were also a ‘refraction’ of this narrative into a larger national story of immigrant communities struggling with each other for political representation, of the conflict between bourgeois and working-class values.We witness the need for order and control yet also a desire for openness, movement and fluidity.

Yehudit Sasportas, ‘The Cavelight’ (2004)

This dichotomy spills over into the Cavelight drawings where ideas around ‘linear’ and ‘cyclical’ time collide. Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant and G.W. F. Hegel understood History as linear, as moving towards an ens realissium – a final goal or ‘purpose’. This view contrasts absolutely with the doctrine of Karmic Rebirth and Reincarnation, which gained increasing popularity in the West after the ‘discovery’ of Buddhist and Indian mysticism. ‘Karma’ is the belief that people’s actions and conduct during the successive phases of their existence determine their ultimate destiny.

As in The Carpenter and the Seamstress, so in The Cavelight, diptych and triptych sequences represent both the linear passage of narrative – of moving from one moment to another, from one place to another – and also its spiral-like unravelling, of déjà vu, a sense of ‘having been there before’. Thus Sasportas responds to the eastern concept of cyclical time in motion, in which there is no distinction between any two moments but in which all Time is a Unity: that ‘nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence’ (Siddhartha).This is why for Hesse, echoing the wisdom of the East,The River – a symbol of Time – is always unchanged and yet at every moment new:

The many-voiced song of the river echoed softly. Siddhartha looked into the river and saw many pictures in the flowing water. He saw his father, lonely,mourning for his son; he saw himself, lonely, also with the bonds of longing for his faraway son; he saw his son, also lonely, the boy eagerly advancing upon the burning path of life’s desires, each one concentrating on his goal, each one obsessed by his goal, each one suffering.The river’s voice was sorrowful. It sang with yearning and sadness, flowing towards its goal . . . When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self but heard them all, the whole, the Unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om – perfection.

Just as Siddhartha understands the river as representing ‘the many’ but also ‘the one’, so does the ‘song of a thousand voices’ resonate in the installations and drawings made by Sasportas.

I caught a sense of what was to come when interviewing Yehudit in November of last year. The Berlin studio was small, neat and scented faintly with jasmine tea. Along the walls were several unfinished drawings of impressive size and scope. Sasportas was immaculately dressed and softly spoken, the delicate lines of the drawings mirrored in her gentle manner. When asked about the place of philosophy in her forthcoming project, Yehudit confessed to experiencing something of an awakening. In the year leading up to the 2002 exhibition, Sasportas had worked in a partially underground studio in Tel-Aviv with the windows covered. She acquiesced in the suggestion that the need to be sealed off from outside influences may have engendered what might be seen as insularity in her early work. Now, in an apartment block, several floors above ground, Sasportas agrees that she is more comfortable ‘in the light’. This increased sense of self-awareness she attributes to spending more time observing nature, amidst forests, rivers and mountains – spaces that inspire genuine reflection. She has undoubtedly emerged with a greater degree of subtlety in her pen and brush technique.

It may be Sasportas’s philosophical bent and her fascination with the spirit/psyche/soul that led her to identify with Eastern imagery. Both Platonic metaphysics and Buddhist thought underpin her most significant solo and group exhibitions. By the River (2002), The Guardian of the Pearl’s Shadow (2004) and her most recent participation in the Japonism exhibition at the Israel Museum (2006) all point towards a fascination with the Eastern calligraphic hand, with the attention to intricate detail, delicate line and the blending of personal biography with elements of the Noetic – the idea of a cosmic consciousness found in Platonism but also deeply embedded in Eastern philosophy. In an essay in By the River (Berkeley Art Museum, University of California), the catalogue accompanying Sasportas’s exhibition of the same name (2002), Christina Vegh referred to Sasportas’s noetic explorations of consciousness and meaning as the ‘cartography of the mental’: