"The artist credits her parents' obsession with collecting as the beginning of what's grown into a scrap-centric process. "My mother was an immigrant from the Ukraine who could improvise anything when we didn't have exactly what we needed, which was most of the time. And my Italian father hasn't ever thrown anything away because one day it might be useful, or some day he might get around to fixing it," she writes."
"Cardboard, candy wrappers, vintage tumblers, and so much more form uncanny miniatures that she refers to as "observations of what people anticipate, complain about, or muse over. Fleeting, unscripted exchanges-mundane yet deeply human-are a continual source of inspiration." Meticulous and playful, the resulting sculptures retain a messy, raw quality that is itself a collection of the original materials. Rather than mask irregularities and signs of wear, Ricci leaves traces of chaos and disorder that capture an authentic quality of modern life."
Lydia Ricci assembles broken pencils, outdated forms, long-ago paid bills, tattered fabric, cardboard, candy wrappers, and vintage tumblers into intricate small-scale worlds. Ricci credits a family habit of collecting and immigrant improvisation for a scrap-centric process built over thirty years of gathered bits and baubles. The miniature scenes function as observations of everyday expectation, complaint, and musing, drawing on fleeting, unscripted human interactions. The sculptures remain meticulous yet retain messy, raw qualities, deliberately preserving irregularities and signs of wear to reflect chaos, disorder, and an authentic sense of contemporary life.
Read at Colossal
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]