Sara Laimon aka Cookie Moon on her lockdown illustrations of trains and wrestlers

Flitting between design, film, music videos, graphic design and branding, Sara Laimon (aka Cookie Moon) has a wide spanning portfolio – but what really caught our attention was her illustration work. Born in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv-based artist has been creating these fantastically minimal depictions of trains and wrestlers, a recent aesthetic that she’s come to define over the course of the lockdown.

Since graduating from her BA studies in Fine Art, held in the department of Screen Based Arts at the Bezel Academy of Art and Design in 2017, Sara has been working as a designer across a host of topics – be it video, photography, illustration, graphic design, animation and collage work. “I find it much more fun to fit the medium to the specific project, rather than the opposite way,” she tells It’s Nice that of her reasons for such a multifarious portfolio.

2018 saw Sara intern for fashion photographer Nick Knight in London’s SHOWstudio, while continuing her graphic design pursuits at Meteor Music Festival and Avira Studios. Not only this, she also co-founded her own music label called Unterman and has had work exhibited globally in shows and festivals in locations such as New York, Minnesota, Tel Aviv, San Jose and Germany.

In recent times and in order to feed her multidisciplinary practice, Sara makes sure to swallow as many visual references as possible through art books or on Instagram – all the while pairing her findings with her own real-life experiences and emotions. “I don’t usually plan my work long in advance and I start illustrating instantly,” she says, “knowing pretty quickly and intuitively if I like it or not.” Alongside these more literal inspirations, Sara uses her dreams as her most prominent resource. This includes scanning her “deepest fears” and taking on board her own studies of Jewish Philosophy. “I am interested in the meeting point between my inner world as an individual and the broader experience of the world’s existence,” she adds, “which comes from years of studying the world’s creation as told in Genesis.”

Sarah’s most recent series, Come on Already, sees a group of illustrations depicting trains. Minimalist in form and structure, we can simply observe the train for all it is: a tubular frame placed among a creamy backdrop, no tracks in sight. Inspired by Publique, Timothee Calame’s solo exhibition at Edouard Montassout a couple of years back, Sara tells us how it was the straight line “crossing a big white canvas” putting “emphasis on motion” that inspired her works to develop. “I was intrigued by the feeling of movement in a clear, blank and non-existent physical sense of space.”

Alongside this, the series continued during quarantine due to the current pandemic. Recalling the “claustrophobic” experiences of being in isolation, as well as the dismantling of a normal routine and access to amenities, this is what steered the illustrations. The result is a metaphorical series that echoes “a slow, ongoing crash”, much like her experiences of the Covid-19 outbreak – to put it bleakly.

In a more positive light, Sara is currently working on a new project titled Sad Dreams~Bad Dreams, a zine that she refers to as her “nightmare diary”. For the past few months, she’s been writing down her nightmares, of which she has decided to pair with texts, colourful illustrations and collages. A refreshing way to solidify those disruptive dreams, Sara hopes that, in some form or another, her work will connect with her audience on a personal level.