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‘I want my art after October 7 to be like a big bang – how life can start again after this’

Artist Sofie Berzon MacKie ran a gallery at Kibbutz Be’eri before her life was turned upside down by last year’s Hamas terrorist attack. Only now has she started finding the inspiration to produce work again – and it reflects the need for humanity to reconnect after the trauma

October 1, 2024 13:52
sofie berzon
Artist Sofie Berzon MacKie
4 min read

FOR months Sofie Berzon MacKie was too traumatised to think about art. An award-winning visual artist, who also ran the art gallery on Kibbutz Be’eri where she’d lived most of her life, everything felt far too broken.

Her friends had been murdered or taken hostage, she’d endured nearly 24 hours of terror in her home on the kibbutz as it was invaded by Hamas terrorists, her three children wouldn’t stop clinging to her, the art gallery had been burnt to the ground and she was living in a cramped hotel room.

Renewal theme: frame from Sofie Berzon MacKie's Lighthouse series[Missing Credit]

The trauma is still there, of course. It is an ongoing thing. But it is apt that the first art she has been able to produce is a collection called Lighthouse.

It is beautiful and complex art – seven small collages which make up a stunning whole – which she calls “the most important work I ever made in my life”.