Northern Israel-based printmaker Haviva Seligson carves and hand-prints a figure mid-breath in a wild landscape, making a linocut that treats the act of printing itself as inseparable from the meaning it carries.
The shofar is one of the oldest ritual instruments in existence, its sound shaped entirely by the body that produces it: the breath, the pressure, the particular attention required to sustain a note. For Haviva Seligson, that quality of embodied presence is exactly what drew her to it as a subject. Shofar, a linocut print created at the end of 2025, places a figure deep in a wild natural landscape, blowing the instrument in what the work frames not as religious observance but as something more personal and more open.
The print emerged from a long engagement with ritual as a living act rather than an inherited one. “Ritual, for me, is not something inherited, but something we return to through the body, through attention, through choice,” Seligson says. Made during a period she describes as calling for deeper connection and reflection, the work is shaped by that particular moment while reaching toward something more durably human: the desire to find meaning through physical practice, through the natural world, through listening inward.
The process of making the print is itself part of that argument. Carving a single linoleum block by hand and printing on Japanese washi paper is slow, pressured work that demands the same quality of attention the image depicts. Each of the six prints in the edition carries subtle variations, marks of the hand that made it, evidence of a process that resists exact replication. “Printmaking, for me, is a form of ritual where repetition slowly becomes presence,” Seligson says. The connection between subject and method is not illustrative but structural: the act of making becomes inseparable from what the work means.
At 100 by 70 centimetres, the print has physical presence to match its subject. The landscape that surrounds the figure is not backdrop but participant, wild and uncontained, grounding the ritual in the earth rather than in any fixed cultural or religious structure. Each print is signed and numbered, a quiet acknowledgement that these six objects are not identical copies but six separate encounters with the same carved block.
Haviva Seligson is a printmaker and visual artist based in northern Israel. Her practice explores ritual as a living, embodied act through material, presence and inner listening. Alongside her work as an artist, she teaches linocut printmaking in her studio.
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Shofar, 2025. Hand-carved linocut, hand-printed on Japanese washi paper, 100 × 70cm. Edition of 6, signed and numbered. Photography: Haviva Seligson.
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