Etai Rogers-Fett

Artist Statement

In my printmaking practice, I draw inspiration from Jewish craft traditions of papercutting, manuscript illumination, and calligraphy to create compositions that blend decorative and narrative imagery and explore letterforms as sculptural bodies. I place my work in conversation with these genres of Jewish book arts in order to tell stories of gender expansive identities often deliberately obscured from this historical body of work - weaving together archival research, folktales, and speculative imagining to trace vibrant trans and queer Jewish lineages. I currently work most often in woodcut and etching. My other creative practices as a language teacher, performer, and researcher in Yiddish and Hebrew deeply inform the themes and questions I explore in my visual artwork. I’m currently working on a project about the memories of Jewish letters as imagined by twenty artist-collaborators throughout the Jewish diaspora. Part of this project will culminate in a series of large scale woodcut sculptures for each letter of the alphabet.