Lilian Shtereva, born in 1994 and raised in Haskovo, Bulgaria is a Brooklyn – based artist. Lilian is currently in the BFA program in Studio Arts at Hunter College, CUNY, New York and will be graduating in 2025.
For all inquiries, contact lilianshtereva [at gmail dot com].
Lilian’s work explores a personal affection and adornment of cloth that drives her artistic interpretation of mending worn, hand-woven and traditional textiles into soft sculptural forms that investigate ideas of cultural dissonance, home and space with the focus on family and legacy. The use a variety of mediums, including most of the traditional fabrics that were hand-woven by the artists’s great-grandmother as well as the “found object” are signifying the importance of place – the place that is defined by ancestry. The manual labor in sewing, embroidery and quilting is a direct measurement of time, by collaborating with the generations that came before, the artist’s work signals the urgency of and need to absorb practical knowledge as a sustainable practice for uncertain futures. The artist’s use of handicrafts and domestic objects to signify her conection to her home and family, and to simultaneously explore her own diasporic experience living in the United States by engaging in the craft techniques of her maternal ancestors.