“Holding Space”, Marie Gallery, Jerusalem, Curator: Gaby Hamburg-Fhima.

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In Holding Space, artist Linda Adams places the canvas upon the easel as an act of making place. As Ariel Hirschfeld writes in the introduction to his Notes on Place: “Place is not granted to us in advance, but is born out of human presence, gaze, touch, and experience.” Only when something defines the easel as a site does it become an existential locus. Adams perceives the body and the mundane interiors not merely as physical environments, but as arenas of being and memory-charged spaces that hold us, even as we hold them.

Familiar yet secluded interiors: stairwells, a skewed angled restroom, thresholds, or the view outward from the studio, are transformed in her hands into emotional architectures, spaces that carry within them both fragility and strength. Adams’s scoliosis positions the spine, that hidden inner structure, as a central axis of her work. The spine’s curving destabilizes balance, while the skin stretched across it becomes an exposed surface of vulnerability. In her paintings, perspective is repeatedly disrupted: lines refuse to level, angles distort. The gaze moves through the body’s curvature; physical experience penetrates the painted space, turning the body into an intimate topography of being, a subconscious inscription of posture itself.

The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu proposed the notion of the “Skin-Ego”: the self, resting on the skin as a boundary and container. For Adams, skin is a language inscribed with both pain and vitality. In her self-portraits and depictions of bodily fragments, she turns her attention to flaws: wrinkles, scars, fissures. Here, skin emerges as testimony, not as a smooth surface. Derrida regarded skin as a permeable boundary where the distinction between inside and outside collapses; Deleuze and Guattari described it as the “Body without Organs” - a plane where organs lose synchronization, a territory upon which infinite forces and desires are inscribed. In Adams’s work, skin accumulates memories and lived time. The figure of a faceless child, her skin lacking facial features, appears as a relief at the threshold of the exhibition, and again within it, hovering as a sign of estrangement from physical reality. Alongside her coils a serpent, recalling the scoliosis spine’s twisted S, echoing the oscillation between decline and resilience, between wound and creative force.

Within the phenomenological tradition - Husserl, Merleau-Ponty - the body is not a thing among things but the “first home of the soul”: the place where we experience the world and situate ourselves within it. Adams’s painting embodies this notion: walls, apertures, and painted floors are not mere background, but incarnations of body-as-space. The painter’s easel itself functions as an added skeleton, both physical and conceptual, like a body containing its own inner unfolding. Adams’s body and the interiors she depicts act as spaces of trauma. Like sites where the unspeakable has occurred, they remain empty, abandoned, and open to interpretation after the fact. The warped lines, failures of perspective, and emphasis on flaws of the skin operate as traces, marks inscribed upon body and space, irreducible, bearers of traumatic memory that resist erasure. The viewer is compelled to reread them, as if they were a detective.

In Holding Space, the gallery itself forms part of this conceptual movement: no longer walls on which paintings are hung, but the skin and sheath of place, a structure that holds the exhibition-body, an essential weave of skeleton, skin, and site. Just as skin covers the body, defines its limits, and filters through it, so do the walls define the boundaries of space, protecting, containing, transmitting inward and outward, yet at the same time retaining the imprints of what has transpired while Holding Space.

Gaby Hamburg-Fhima, Curator.