Junk - Roni Gonen Simchoni

She enters the studio, closes the door behind her, and immediately goes to the table.

Beside the table, there is a large box with cardboard packages of various sizes, wood scraps from carpentry, baskets with branches, cardboard rolls, corks, threads, fabrics, and fragments of toys. 

Junk.  Here in the studio, it is a rich world with many possibilities.

She takes the hot glue gun, and I delve with her into the private world of her images and imagination. We are drawn into a magical kingdom. I don't know what will happen in the next hour. Neither does she.

She observes, listens to herself, experiments, and lets the image that comes up lead the work. She quickly glues together some wooden blocks. Some corks make for wheels, a curtain ring becomes a steering wheel, and here is a locomotive, pulling invisible carriages of hidden worries, fears, dreams and wishes. The smoke coming out of its chimney is a pile of soft, colorful balls. She paints the locomotive with many colors and places it on the rails, as if saying, I have the strength to move. I have the strength to lead. I have power which sooner or later will be fulfilled.

He takes a long, rectangular cardboard box and turns it into a ship sailing the sea, with a helmsman's station, computer and compass, and even a chair for the captain. With this ship he will sail from childhood to adulthood, from the warm and accommodating bosom of his mother to the masculine realms of his father. He is sitting in the captain's chair and for a short time I accept the role of the navigator, until he learns to read the map and discovers his inner compass, which will allow him to hold the ship's helm and navigate by himself, even in stormy seas.

Three cardboard packages are placed on top of each other, creating a multi-story building, with windows, doors and an elevator. Deep thought and a lot of work are invested in the transparent elevator, which seems to be the significant image in this building.

To me, the elevator symbolizes the internal connection between all the levels of the soul - from the underground, invisible floor to the top one. Who goes up and down in it? What is there on each floor? What does the transparency of the elevator and the fact that it is external to the building mean?

The building will be changed several times, and the story of the elevator will also become clearer later. It is a non-verbal, intuitive process. The interpretive observation will be done from a distance of time.

Some wood blocks, skewers, and doctor's sticks are fastened with a wide adhesive paper in no clear order. Strips of thin adhesive paper are wrapped around the parts, gluing and tying. Is the child building a house or maybe a fort? A ruined fortress. A heap of ruins keeps piling up. The initial image of a house - a square with a triangular roof, two windows and a door - does not exist here. Watching the process of constructing the destruction, I ask without a voice, how many destroyed houses will you have to display until we understand and acknowledge that your inner house is in ruins, and maybe it was never built as a stable and organized structure? How much expression will you have to give to this destruction before you will be able to climb the pile of ruins, stand up, stick a flag on top of it and start to rebuild a stable home?

The studio is the supporter, the enabler, the host. I am the assistant, participating in the action as an anchor, allowing the child to trust himself, to believe in himself, to take control and responsibility for the process and the result. He is the leader and the initiator. My hands are placed under him as a safety net. I watch the margin for errors that become possible. Together, we learn to what extent he would be willing to experiment and how many so-called failures he will be able to make allowance for on the way to success. Where success is the exposure of his repressed, forbidden inner world, which seeks to be expressed through playful, creative, free construction.

The sculptural product of this process is not something to take home, to put on a shelf, to display. It can't really be played with. Soon it will be forgotten and abandoned, even thrown away, but the creator will continue to carry within him the memory of the image he constructed and the symbolism of the transference for which it was created.

Junk is in the eyes of the beholder.