While much contemporary art deals with questions of materiality, the things that make up an artwork, and how artists collaborate with material properties to locate spaces of aesthetic ease, Cathy Della Lucia’s work directly opposes her materials. She outwardly struggles with them, purposefully enacting difficult paths forward in the pursuit of transformation. As a ceramicist and woodworker, she strives to combine materials in ways that defy their properties. Wood carries the matte sheen of ceramics. Ceramics exhibit a plastic quality that tilts toward the machine-made. “Real-life” materials, like fake grass, TV mounting arms, and industrial bolting systems, abandon their intended function to serve unexpected ends.
One of my first entry points into Della Lucia’s work was a conversation about what inspires her forms. She recalled noticing a broken door handle as she was passing another car on a highway and spoke at length about the angle at which this door handle “drooped” off the car, barely held in its tenuous place by rusty hardware. For her, this moment represented the “glitch” in the machine of economic systems, which assume the posture of efficiency but inevitably slide toward inertia. That exquisite space between order and disorder, precarity and precision, fuels the strange interstitial magic within her work, which balances predetermined rules and uncertainty.
Mallory A. Ruymann: I first saw your work in a group show at Piano Craft Gallery in Boston. The epic Zero Days to Expiration (2020) feels, in retrospect, like a thesis of an artwork, showing where your practice was at that moment in time and where you wanted to go. Why did you make this sculpture, and what were you trying to express?
Cathy Della Lucia: That work came about when I got my first studio after grad school. Up to then, everything was dictated by a lack of space. But with a space to expand into, I focused on building out the structures of my practice. Zero Days to Expiration reflects the foundations I built to make my practice sustainable while learning about craftsmanship and tools. I was looking at IKEA furniture that I owned or could get ahold of easily, particularly the LACK series, to break down how objects are made—modular things made in cheap, easy, and highly reproducible ways. . .
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