Deborah Yasinsky

Artist Statement

Deborah Yasinsky is a New York City-based artist, curator, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice explores memory, childhood, and ritual. Through a blend of lived experience and imagination, she creates surreal, escapist environments across painting, printmaking, ceramics, drawing, and film, approaching both joyful and traumatic memories through symbolic intermediaries that illuminate the tension between despair and hope.
Her imagery draws heavily from the flora and fauna remembered from her childhood along the Hudson River, the Palisades, and Inwood Hill Park. Within these landscapes, stylized figures emerge amid repeating motifs of birds, butterflies, unicorns, and dense forest imagery. By utilizing flattened perspective forms and jeweled objects, these elements are juxtaposed with abstractions of memory that simultaneously celebrate moments of wonder while memorializing painful life episodes.
Recollections of frequent visits to The Cloisters deeply inform her references to medieval ornamentation and the complex symbolism of ritual objects, which she draws from both Jewish and Catholic traditions. This historical dialogue translates across multiple mediums. Yasinsky’s ceramic works function as narrative vessels, carved in low relief and finished with painterly underglazes and glazes. In contrast, her paintings are heavily encrusted with beads, rhinestones, jewelry, glitter, and dense, layered patterning. This highly tactile surface quality evokes the nostalgic experience of exploring her mother’s jewelry box as a child, reflecting on the complex, timeless, and shared experiences women navigate through youth, caregiving, and relationships.
Ultimately, Yasinsky's work stands as a testament to the labor of the handmade. By embedding intense physical time, decorative detail, and deeply personal symbology into wood, clay, and canvas, she builds spaces where personal history and universal mythologies collide.