“Under blue evening skies, Under clear evening skies, Sails a full and bright moon. Silently, silently it wandered And quietly gazed At the forest, orchard, and field…” In the gallery space, amidst blue walls and on a green (synthetic) grass floor, a small, colorful camp of tents "grew" overnight. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the tent fabric is made from dozens of baby clothes, sewn together to form a patchwork of childhood. The tents—temporary shelters offering rest—are topped with faceless child-like figures that, due to their height, evoke tribal totem poles. On one hand, the tents offer a protective, enveloping space, much like the skin protects the body, or the self protects the soul. On the other hand, this space is unsettling, due to the materials used (a collection of bodiless baby clothes), the way they are used, and the associations they provoke—evoking experiences of orphanhood, displacement, and abandonment. This raises the questions: who is guarding whom in this colorful night camp, absent of adults? Does the formation of a collective identity come at the cost of erasing the personal identity of faceless infants? Adva Drori, a former kibbutz child, seems to be attempting, in almost a shamanistic way, to create a space for mending—a space for healing childhood—her own childhood. Through the act of sewing, she tries to stitch together these spaces, these tears, connecting and wounding, making present and erasing, working from both the inside and outside. Adva Drori is a multidisciplinary artist with a unique, total, and distinctly feminine language, rich in textiles and embellishments. The crafts she engages in—sewing, felting, embroidery, knitting—are often defined as "women's handiwork." Through these mediums, she addresses psychological and social issues related to gender, Israeli identity, and memory. In this exhibition, as in many of her works, Drori transforms the gallery space into a surreal kingdom filled with details, drawing its imagery from a world of dreams and nightmares. Drori takes us on a journey into fantasy, entangled in the threads of her childhood, translating personal emotions into material, textiles, and the realms of legend and imagination. With a red embroidery thread, in a tangled texture of labor-intensive handwork, she sews and combines baby clothes, doll parts, toys, text, and textiles, which merge into a biographical fabric—sometimes worn by the artist as a dress (as part of a performance), hung on the wall, or installed in the space. Adva Drori grew up in Kibbutz Sarid, in the communal children's home. Like other kibbutz children of different generations, she too, as a child, stood in the night, full of fears, calling: "Night Watcher, come!" to the loudspeaker hanging on the corridor wall of the children's house. Her kibbutz childhood and communal sleeping arrangement provide her with an endless reservoir of emotional material for her artistic laboratory. With each exhibition, she delves deeper, examining another angle, another material, moving between the personal and the collective experience, and back again. She explores the narrative through material, creating a movement toward the psychic wound, stitching her experiences, fears, memories, and dreams into her work. Drori presents viewers with a total experience of a childhood world that is both magical and painful. Among the tents in this exhibition are colorful fabric dolls, stuck on wooden poles. Most of the dolls have indistinct identities. Their vibrant colors conceal something more troubling: amputated limbs, wounds, and various injuries—deceptive objects that wrap pain and trauma in a facade of beauty and playfulness. Between them, red braided ropes stretch and wind. Are these the threads held by the Fates, determining our path, as in mythology? Drori's works, while drawn from her personal story as a child in communal sleeping arrangements, also expand to resonate with broader, universal themes of childhood and orphanhood. They contain archetypes from the collective unconscious of a wide cultural spectrum. In a way, Drori's works correspond with the felt creations of German artist Joseph Beuys, who saw the artist as a shaman, or healer of society's wounds from the past. Beuys believed that every material and every connection between materials holds special energy, which can be harnessed for survival and healing. The creation itself is both the pain and the remedy. The audience serves as the critic, but also as the holder and enabler of the healing of both the personal and collective wounds. Drori's journey is one of self-discovery, focused materially on the world of textiles. For Drori, textiles, and especially clothing, were an early form of self-expression, a way to distinguish herself from the other kibbutz children. Her grandmother sewed her special dresses, different from the uniform clothing made by the kibbutz seamstresses. "Clothing both draws attention but also acts as a protective layer, both capturing the gaze and blocking it," Drori says. "The issue of blurred identity, uniformity, and the erasure of identity is something I still feel weighs on me, even though I am different…" For this exhibition, Drori personally sewed a collection of evening gowns made from baby clothes. Again, the inversion of roles is evident—who is protecting whom? "I think that over the years, I am discovering the protector within me, the one I didn’t have as a child. I'm learning to find her within myself. Who is this protector? What does she represent to me? And how can I strengthen my connection to her? I build the seams... sewing them just like Wendy, who sews Peter Pan's lost shadow. That’s how I sew this protector for myself, the one I never had, even physically." The conversation about communal sleeping in the kibbutzim resurfaces every few years, explored at various levels—anger versus acceptance, ideology versus personal cost, conformity versus individuality. Perhaps as part of a process of closure, reconciliation, or acceptance, Drori recruited the seamstresses of Kibbutz Sarid, led by ‘Shevi,’ her legendary caregiver from the children's house, who, by special request, sewed 50 light-blue fabric dolls for her. Drori's exhibition, *"Night Watcher, Come to the Light Blue Garden,"* represents a closing of the circle, as she returns to present a solo exhibition in Tivon. Drori seeks to tell her story once again, in this place overlooking the landscape of her childhood. She wishes to reopen the painful discussion with the local community, her fellow kibbutz members, and the residents of the valley and the surrounding area. Through sorrow, pain, and longing, Drori sharpens the conversation. She weaves and sews together a personal biographical narrative that is also national and communal. Despite the feverish sewing and the Sisyphean effort, the narrative, in the end, remains unraveled. – Michal Shekhnai-Yakobi