Creating worlds of longing and wonder
- Andrea is inspired by folk traditions from a variety of global cultures
- She intends for her work to be a jumping off point for wonder and imagination
- Her mosaic murals are in New York subway stations and the U.S. embassy in Romania
A childhood visit to an artist’s house museum set Andrea Dezso on the path to an art career. Years later, she left her native Transylvania, Romania to study in Hungary, then moved to the U.S. The natural world and traditional ways of working with materials inspire Andrea’s work, from tunnel books to illustrations, paintings to prints. In her art, humans and creatures freely inhabit fantastical worlds. “With tunnel books, what I'm really looking for is creating spaces of longing,” she says. Humor is there, too. “Something tough has to have some kind of levity,” she says. Andrea particularly enjoys the nature and personality of traditional Japanese handmade paper, such as kozo, washi and gampi. “It sings at a specific register,” she says.
Interview
- Does your work follow a folk tradition?
- I'm curious about how people work with materials and tools and folk traditions; that traditional way of people expressing themselves in a region. I'm interested in how materials speak, how they convey meaning and have a conversation with a maker.
- Do your childhood experiences affect your art?
- It goes back to when I used to live in Transylvania in Romania. I grew up during the ‘70s and ‘80s, during communism. We couldn't travel; couldn't go places. My going to different places took place through books and stories and the imagination.
- What types of paper do you use in your tunnel books?
- Paper that cuts in an extremely clean way. It cannot have little tufts of fiber sticking out because that yanks you out of the experience of looking into a world: You see it as something made with paper. Very few papers do that and also are easy to cut by hand.
- Do your tunnel books follow a narrative?
- I see them as jumping off points for the imagination, where I create a scene that doesn't necessarily have a story attached to it. I'd like the viewer to bring themselves to it… what they are curious about or interested in. I'm trying to create experiences of wonder.
Andrea Dezsö is an : she began her career in 1996 and she started teaching in 1996
Where
Andrea Dezsö
