My Rainy Day Book
Hila Laviv
2017
A bilingual artist’s book paying tribute to a 1917 craft book (Vad Ska Vi Göra) written by the artist’s great-grandmother, Anna Warburg, with the illustrator Elsa Beskow, and influenced by the theories of Friedrich Fröbel, founder of the modern Kindergarten. The artist’s book carries the same title as the English translation from 1938 (My Rainy Day Book) and in it Laviv’s artworks and collections are framed and presented in relation to the original craft book structure and content.
“The original book addresses the reader in the first person and adopts a style of personal initiation. When I read the instructions I feel Anna talking to me. Since naturally the book is personal to me, and very moving, I determined a set of rules in my work process with it. In the first stage I read every chapter and relearned to do the handicrafts. My body remembered, because as a child I did these handworks with my siblings and cousins, under the guidance of my grandmother, who learned to make them from her mother. Thus I find myself in a timeless continuum, embedded in an inspiring chain of women. This is a move that tries to find out something about the sources from which I grew up to be an artist, through these activities for a rainy day, on very hot summer days.”
- Design: Tirza Ben Porat
- Editing: Maya Shimony
- Texts: Vered Zafran-Gani, Sandra Weil
- Translation: Maya Shimony
- Copies: 500
- Pages: 158
- Type of binding: hardcover
- Dimensions (cm): 22.5X14.1
- Printing: A.R. Printing LTD
- Binding: A.R. Printing LTD
- Publication: Hila Laviv
- Place of publication: Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel
- Supported by: The Israeli Lottery Council for Culture & Arts, The Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts
- ISBN: 9789655721768
Hila Laviv (b. 1975), lives and works in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. She holds a BFA from the Beit Berl College, Faculty of the Arts, and an MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. Using archival materials and materials that characterize handicrafts, Laviv’s works deal with family mythologies and questions of reconstruction and rebuilding of disappearing worlds. She works in a number of mediums including video, collage and large-scale installations. In 2021, Laviv presented a solo exhibition at the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod.