For protection. lithograph on stone with etching and screenprinting by Lya Finston, 2024. read her statement on her artistry below:
My artistic practice is an investigation of worry, and the ways in which religion and perception construct themselves around it. My reflections on Jewish folk culture legitimize superstition, holding it sacred for the cultural legacy and promises of safety it provides. Here we find less intellectualized, and more inherited frameworks for understanding the world, whose very unprovability lend them validity. These traditions speak volumes to the human experience, illuminating the regional and historical circumstances from which they were born, and mirroring timeless anxieties of humankind. My prints and sculptures exist within a blended domestic-spiritual landscape. By enlisting the inherent authority of the graphic mark, I am able to bolster so-called superstitions, reifying my depictions of them in a visual language that is at once historical and contemporary.
