“Joy of Jerusalem” is a diptych that reconstructs the city not as a geographic location but as an emotional threshold — a site where centuries of memory, faith, architecture, and contradiction converge. Built from layered collage, paper-mâché, pigment, and salvaged fragments, the work reflects the complexity of experiencing Jerusalem through a neurodivergent sensory system: flashes of stone, bursts of color, fragments of mosaic, and an underlying pulse of tension and reverence.
The two panels act as companions — two simultaneous sensory readings of the same place. The textures mimic ancient stone walls, the patina of time-worn pathways, and the quiet intensity of sacred spaces that hold both devotion and grief. The scattered shapes and layered contours reference the city’s archaeological strata, its overlapping histories, and the unending dialogue between past and present. Jerusalem’s emotional temperature is not linear; it arrives as an overload: a city felt in the body before it is understood by the mind.
In this work, the artist channels the sensation of walking through Jerusalem: the crush of bright markets, the hush of religious quarters, and the sudden intimacy of light falling on carved stone. The diptych holds both the serenity and the turbulence of the city — the joy that rises from human connection, shared rituals, and collective memory, as well as the heaviness carried in its stones.
As a central work in the Sensory Archives series, “Joy of Jerusalem” demonstrates the artist’s ability to translate overwhelming sensory input into layered emotional architecture. It stands as both a tribute to the city and a visual record of how place becomes memory inside a neurodivergent mind.
