Tearing and Mending: Inbal Aaronfeld Lusky

The artwork of Inbal Aaronfeld Lusky weaves a touching story about loss and rebirth, the fragility of family ties and importance of deepening roots as well as allowing oneself to blossom through hardship. Inbal’s artistic story is a yarn that begins with thread. Her father owned a clothing factory in Haifa. When she went as a young girl to the factory, Inbal was enchanted by all the little threads on the floor. She scooped them up and arranged them, giving life to the discarded leftovers as their own creation. In a meditative state, Inbal finds figures and landscapes in these little cast-off pieces of string. Inbal sees the value in what others ignore. Through these seemingly insignificant threads, she reaches to her childhood and also connects to her father. Inbal’s parents are divorced and the theme of a broken family takes center stage in her stitched photographs. Through a longing to connect to relatives, who for the most part she never even met, Inbal takes out her needle and stitches on embellishments, inserting herself through this act, into the lives of those that came before her. This process of stitching is a therapeutic one that heals her and bring her closer to her ancestors. Instead of mending pants, she is mending her family ties. Around the time the Coronavirus pandemic hit, Inbal herself went through a divorce. She was suddenly no longer able to teach art classes due to the social distancing restrictions. She looked out the door of her downsized new home, and saw the thorny thistles that look dead half the year and then suddenly bloom into beautiful flowers in spring. The thistle is an agent of destruction, it will prick a passerby and rip their clothing, but after the dry heat of the summer passes and the winter rains seep into the ground, it dots the landscape with colorful plumes. Inbal splits the canvas into three areas, like a foreground and background of a stage set. She plays with realism and abstraction, letting the ground come in and out of focus to the viewer. Depth of field is flattened and simplified. The thistle becomes a silhouette, the shadow of a memory of difficult times weathered. Inbal found in the thistle a kindred spirit. With all these big changes in her life, she was suddenly able to create as much as she wanted. In her new freedom to work on her art, Inbal realized that she was like the thistle, though it appears dried up and dead, it is just waiting for the right conditions to bloom.