״In 2005, I started working on a series of small landscape drawings that became part of a long-term project for many years to follow. In the first of the landscape series, details were subtracted. Valleys, sunsets and trees were reduced to linear contours and dots, simplifications. That was how I perceived the landscape of my home: as a fragmented place, scarred, and longing to be put back together, to be reassembled and reconnected. Some drawings would require the utilization of adhesive transparent tape to be worked into the drawing as though taping the pencil mark to the sheet of paper. The pencil mark that has observed the outline of the landscape in a distance, and now fixed as an attempt of permanence. This disconnection (accompanied by a desire for reconnection) strongly resembles my own relationship to my home (land). Though I was raised in Canada, I returned to Israel to bury my father in the Palestine that he loved. A feeling of estrangement surrounding my new home is channeled in my drawings. As I saw Palestine then, I experienced ambiguous sensations, questioning them through simple, minimal drawings. I felt I was trying to ‘connect the points”, the dots or the experiences. To link the experiences. To find a way to draw smooth effortless lines of experience within life as one would find within a colouring book. For this reason, I wanted to give the title “Connect the dots homeland” to the first set of drawing experiments. But later on, as the series developed and its subject expanded to include a first look into children’s stories, I imagined the landscape as the earthly mother, comforter, living behind and among trees – not existing behind trees in order to hide out of fear - but living behind trees as a symbol for an disappearing existence or a silent presence and perhaps also, for the sake of being discovered, as in a ‘hide and seek’ game.״ Jumana Emil Abboud