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Have you ever felt compelled to create artwork in response to your yoga practice?
Meet Ahuva Zeloof, a lifelong yoga aficionado and yoga-inspired sculptor.
After teaching yoga since the 1970’s, Zeloof recently turned her hand to creating artworks inspired by female movement, energy, and her own experiences as a woman and mother.
Zeloof creates her beautiful sculptures using many materials, including bronze, stone, wax and glass. She is inspired by both the strength of the woman’s body when pushed to physical extremes, as well as the emotional resilience demonstrated by women around the world every day.
Her art represents both her own life story, and the universal female experience: ‘My works reflect my life, from the physical, practicing yoga, pregnancies, births, motherhood, to the emotional, fears, family, hopes and aspirations’, Zeloof comments. As we experience in our own yoga practice, Zeloof’s sculptures are a combination of the physical and the psychological, demonstrating the ideal collaboration of mind, body and spirit.
Zeloof finds an emotional release in sculpture, often losing herself in her work for hours on end. We are all familiar with the feeling of time flying by during a yoga class, reaching the end of the practice and wondering how time could have passed so quickly! In the artist’s own words: ‘There is a freedom you feel when you practice yoga. You are in your own world, concentrating, and at peace.’
The impact of Covid-19 has taught us all the true meaning of being in one’s own world, yet Zeloof has not let the Coronavirus lock-down stop her. Instead, she grappled with new ways to create works. Unable to go out and choose stones herself, as she usually would, she ordered five huge rocks over the phone without being able to see their shapes, veins or details. Zeloof was not restricted by the physicality of the project, using her grandchildren’s skateboard to wheel the enormous rocks into place. (Did I mention that she is 74?!)
The resulting works are testament to Zeloof’s determination. Her most recently completed work, FRACTURED, carved from black stone, shows a woman’s upturned face, caught in a moment of rest and contemplation. Even this work is linked to her passion for yoga, as she has commented: ‘My facial sculptures respond to the spiritual well-being that I gain through practicing yoga’.
Going back to the story behind Zeloof’s wider oeuvre of work, her sculptures are a joyful celebration of the female body. The artist herself has described woman’s body as ‘the most genius machine. No robot stuff, no technology, and yet it’s so functional. It can do so much.’ Her presentation of woman’s body as ‘functional’ feels like a progressive and liberating step away from most of Art History, where woman’s body has been viewed as an object through the male gaze. Zeloof’s yogic figures break free from the shackles of history and embody strength, solidity and empowerment.
Zeloof only turned her attention to making art in recent years. Except for an Art Foundation course at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute in 2016, she is largely self-taught. She came to sculpture after raising a family and her work displays all the richness and depth associated with a life lived well. Like many older female artists, she is now beginning to find her voice creatively and in terms of public recognition and exhibition. Her upcoming exhibition at Diba Art Gallery, London, is currently postponed, but keep an eye on Zeloof’s Instagram for updates!
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