With the exception of a brief visit to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, I am a self-taught artisan who creates strange assemblages out of natural ephemera and binds books by hand. Both of these are the result of a childhood suffused with story and with magic—the elusive magic of fairy tales read to me from the brittle pages of very old books and of the more physical magic of the wild nature surrounding me.
In the wooded garden behind my grandmother's house I developed a deep appreciation of the ancient earth and the things that remain of seasons past. My art is a means of communicating the understanding I've gained through the observation of and participation in the natural cycles of the land. It was in old tales of the wood, of wolves and witches and princes who turn into frogs that I found a desire to tell my own tales. My writing is a means of spinning straw into gold, of pulling life's dross through the eye of the fantastic and sewing it up into stories, much liked those that I was once told.
She consults the sacred texts of fairy tales and the oral tradition of folklore, interpreting and reinterpreting them through the techniques of "found art" in a new translation of the primordial language of myth. Her work utilizes leaves and bones, shells and stones, the wings of dragonflies—the stuff of dreams—in an iconic retelling of the old traditions as seen through the shattered lens of modernity.
Erzebet's writing is based in the inherent connection between word and image: as she draws her inspiration from the world around her, and its inspiration of our dreams of Faerie, so too does she return it to the world with her poems and stories, crafting a narrative of the fantastic that transcends genre distinctions.
— Dr. Helen Pilinovsky