One day, in 2012, bulldozers arrived in the open fields surrounding Sharon Poliakine’s residential neighborhood in the Israeli town of Ra’anana, and a new man-made landscape began to unfold. Anyone who witnessed the preparation works for the paving of Route 531, which runs across the Sharon region, will remember the dramatic and sudden change that this infrastructure project – one of the largest ever in the Greater Tel Aviv region – wrought upon the landscape.
Poliakine monitored the transformation with keen interest. Every Saturday, she would go out to the area, equipped with a backpack and camera, and walk along the section that had been excavated between Rishpon and Kfar Sava. This gave rise to a new body of work, made up of hundreds of preparatory photographs; dozens of sketches of workers’ portraits, castor-oil plants that had quickly taken root in the fresh mounds of hamra soil, and piles of rebar iron scattered around the area (which, after a period of rain, when the route was flooded, looked like trapped shipwrecks); a series of paintings and prints based on those sketches; and various works made of construction iron rods.

Sharon Poliakine, from the series Route 531, 2018, mixed media on iron, courtesy of the artist and Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv (photo: Avraham Hay)