Debi Oulu wears a small pendent around her neck that says “Do art.” Asked why, she says, “I'm free. I wake up in the morning and I say 'What am I going to do today?' And this is my motto. Maybe I got it from Nike's 'Just do it,' but it's mine. It tells me to do it. To do art. To not overthink it too much. This is sort of my daily kick in the butt, which tells me to do art.” Oulu began doing art almost 20 years ago – with an intense, all-consuming dedication – and has never looked back. Her latest expression of her inner drive to “do art” is an upcoming exhibition in Jaffa called “Penetration.” Acknowledging the word's sexual connotations, Oulu states that she is using it instead in the sense of having the ability to discover the inner contents or meaning of things, to understand something more deeply and acutely. She will attempt to achieve this with 18 illuminated installations. “They're abstract light sculptures of people,” she says. “You know, when you think of a portrait of somebody, you think of the eyes, the nose, the ears and somehow capturing in the facial expression who that person is. I decided to go deeper and sort of strip the skin down and try to get to the person's inner essence. I asked myself how I could express a portrait of someone through a combination of objects in an abstract sculpture. So I combine these illuminated cables, which are basically thick white ropes with lights inside them, which I tie and combine with different objects to create the portrait sculpture. With this I try to somehow get to the essence of who that person is, as I see them as an artist.” These “objects” are things Oulu finds, bits of life's flotsam and jetsam that she thinks have stories. She combines these objects with ropes, which she says represent “a luminescence representing the soul, which can be tied or twisted into different shapes and forms to create what I call a narrative of a person.” “Penetration” consists of installations, each portraying “someone who affected me in some strong way. I am trying to find the combination between objects and the stories they tell to portray the essence of people who've affected me.” So who does she portray? “People who have affected me sometime in my life. I have Yosi, my husband; Alona, my girlfriend; Moti, my late father-in-law; Avivit, a friend who is an artist. This guy David, a young 24-year-old who is very free, music oriented, lives the life, but is not very stable. So I capture that instability with piano strings I had from an old piano. Piano strings have to be clamped down and pulled taut in order to get the right tune. So here I just let them flow. They're not in tune and on key. But they're free. “I have one piece in the exhibition that's encased in salt crystals, because I feel like that person has an inner light, an identity that is strong, which I represent with a straight, untied rope. But the crystals are hiding it and keeping it locked inside. That person sort of struck me in a very negative way, but I created something which I think is one of my best and most beautiful sculptures.” Needless to say, Oulu's combination of “things that have stories,” cables and light are very different from the more conventional portrait sculpture that most of us are accustomed to. She suggests that they might nonetheless be more evocative and emotionally compelling. “A friend of mine in Yehud inherited from his father a plant nursery, which burned down because of arson. I went to him and asked if I could have one of the burnt pieces from one of the structures. He gave me a piece that was all burnt and cracked and told me it was a piece from a building his father had built with his own hands. I took that piece, strung the light through it, and that was basically my father-in-law, who had just recently passed away at the time. I didn't tell anyone. I just hung it up and I brought my husband, whose father had just recently passed away and I showed it to him. He said, 'That's really beautiful, but I can't have it in the house.' He didn't know that I was portraying his father, but there was something in there that affected him deeply, a feeling passed on without words, which to me is what art is about. I knew I succeeded when I saw his reaction.” She says that these pieces represent the culmination of everything she has tried to do in art up to now. Another exhibition is planned for April, with more to follow. “I really want to get these art pieces out there because I can see myself doing this for a long time. It involves people and philosophy, and objects, and narrative; and each one is different.” Oulu's personal narrative – of a life that began conventionally enough and slowly evolved into a living, breathing, almost relentless expression of art – is worth looking into. She was born in Arizona to a Jewish family. Her father was a doctor, musician, painter and sculptor. Finishing high school a year early, she and her twin sister decided to take a year off and visit Israel. After the two did ulpan at Kibbutz Matzuva near the border with Lebanon, Oulu's sister decided to stay here. Debi longed for the life of an American university, however, and returned to study at the University of California at San Diego, where she majored in communications and minored in Judaic studies and political science. “Then I wanted to see the world for a while. I took off, did a year of traveling in Asia, knowing I would probably end up in Israel.” She did. Oulu married in 1994 and has three children. After a stint in the tourism industry, she studied and began work in 3D animation. She then branched out into in interactive video and website design in 1998. “My creativity was always there,” she says. “And once I had child No. 2, raising them and building websites and doing Web design, I got to the point where I could sort of decide what it was I really wanted to do now. And I said art.” Oulu began to study art under the direction of artist Yehezkel Cohen, once a week in Kiryat Ono. “I remember the first day I touched clay. I remember the feeling of being able to manipulate it, to use my hands with material. It was like everything I needed to build three-dimensional objects on a computer, and actually creating them live. You know how you have these moments of epiphany in which everything suddenly clicks? I said to myself, 'Yeah, this is it.'” She later enrolled at Hamidrasha Art School at Beit Berl College and studied there for three years. “After that I started working with somebody I knew at a foundry for artists, casting bronze. I worked with him and also developed my own art for about a year and a half, until he kicked me out. That was the point when I said, 'This is it. I'm now a fulltime artist.'” This was at the end of 2010. From that point on, she says, she has lived and breathed art, and has considered it the defining journey of her life – a journey that has led her, among other accomplishments, to be one of the founding free spirits of the annual Burning Man (Midburn) festival in Israel, where for six days a temporary city is set up in the Negev, creating an environment that encourages a communal lifestyle, creativity, radical self-expression, and art. Art is a significant part of the event. “I knew that it was the kind of art I wanted to get involved with, big interactive installation pieces. That kind of art.” Oulu created her first big installation art piece at the first Midburn Festival, and her collaboration has grown as the festival itself has grown in successive years. Drawing around 3,500 people in its first appearance in the summer of 2014, the 2017 edition is expected to attract close to 10,000. “It's really about making dreams happen. For me, my dreaming is my art. Where else can I do this kind of crazy art? They help me with funding, they give me a place and an audience of that has now blown up to 10,000 people, and tons of people who want to be part of the art and volunteer. I really like the interactive part, where people become part of the art. The art becomes 'art' only where there's the interaction.” For example, her first installation piece in 2014 was called The Gifting Tree, a tree with places to hang things, which people were invited to take or to add things of their own. “Anything that people really needed was there. I heard so many stories from people who came and said, 'Just what I needed at that moment! I went to the tree, and it was there!' Even one of the police officers patrolling the area asked someone what the installation was and was told it's a gifting tree, and that if he saw anything he liked he could have it. So he took something, and the next day he brought some things from home and put them on the tree.” Not only does Oulu have another Midburn festival coming up this summer, along with other exhibitions of her artwork, but she spends her “free time” on activities that are about nothing other than art. A notable example is what she calls the “Art Treasure Hunt.” “It's an urban art treasure hunt, where 40 artists gift their art,” she explains. “We put it up in a gallery for people to look at. People can choose which art piece they would like to own. If they find a correlating magnet that has been hidden on the street, they can come back to the gallery and own the piece. We're really trying here to raise the awareness that anyone can be an art collector.” Asked what she would do with her life if an evil genie appeared and told her that she could no longer “do art,” she pauses for a long moment and replies, “I would write.” But later, hours after our interview, she fires off an email that reads: “The whole way home I kept thinking about your last question, 'what would I do if I couldn't be an artist anymore?' My answer of being a writer isn't really correct, because to me a writer is another kind of artist, an artist who uses words… I guess being an artist is part of me, like saying I'm a woman, or a mother – things that cannot be taken away. “Penetration” is on display until January 26 at the Omer Tiroche Gallery, 8 Kedumim Square, Old Jaffa. For further information, visit www.DebiOulu.com.
Getting to the essence: Illuminated cables(photo credit: TAMUZ RACHMAN)