My work explores how patterns—both visual and behavioral—reveal the sacred dimension within everyday practices, tracing the networks of beliefs and stories that bind us together. By transforming mundane objects and emphasizing their ritual potential, I investigate how traditions are preserved and transmitted through symbols and memories across generations, finding commonalities in our lived experiences across history and cultures. Recent wall sculptures, vessels and paintings resemble votive objects and devotional paraphernalia and merge traditional materials with collected man-made objects. Controlled, repetitive motifs take on meaning as symbols of particular daily occurrences, food ingredients, cosmic elements or personal memories.
My process is rooted in traditional craft. Through the materiality and tactility of my media, which includes ceramics, gold and synthetic materials, I invite the viewer to come closer and observe the details of the works as a way of discovering personal and universal meaning. Paintings and 3D objects are in a constant dialogue between intuitive gestures and carefully planned structures and allow me to preserve my connection to ancestral making while expanding the dialogue of tradition.
Adina Andrus makes work that confronts questions of memory, belonging, and visual culture across time and space. Andrus is a recipient of the Queens Council for the Arts New Work Grant and the NY State Arts Alive Artist Grant and has exhibited work in the United States and Romania, including at the Spring/Break Art Show (New York, NY), CollarWorks (Troy, NY), LABSpace Gallery (Hillsdale, NY), the Romanian Cultural Institute (New York, NY), and Make a Point Gallery (Bucharest, Romania). She studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Students’ League. Andrus lives and works in the New York area.