Ride wave in sculptor's work at DeCordova

By NANCYE TUTTLE, Sun Staff
Lowell Sun

When you catch sculptor Nadya Volicer's latest work, you'll feel like a surfer slicing through a multicolored wave made of small pieces of wood.

That was her intention, said Volicer, who at 26 is carving a name for herself in the New England art scene.

“It's a rip curl like a surfer would go through. It's not parallel and you walk through it,” Volicer said last week by phone from her studio in Marion, near New Bedford.

The piece, called “Homespun,” is installed in a hallway at Lincoln's DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. Volicer was one of 10 artists invited by the DeCordova to participate in its Annual Exhibition, which opened in May and continues through July 31. She will host a Meet the Artist gallery talk Saturday at 3 p.m. in the third-floor lobby, where her work is installed.

This exhibit is the latest success for Volicer, a Bedford native who was gallery manager at Lowell's Revolving Museum from September 2003 to August 2004. She moved to Marion last fall when her boyfriend, sculptor Ryan Walker, entered graduate school at UMass Dartmouth.

While in Lowell, she created an installation at Evos Arts Institute and her work was shown at the Whistler House and the Revolving Museum. Nick Capasso, curator at the DeCordova, saw her work at Evos and asked her to submit a proposal.

Creating it took 2 1/2 months in the studio, plus another week to install it. As with Volicer's other work, all material used is recycled from previous work.

“I'm always looking for new stuff to recycle, and was always out scavenging on trash night in Lowell,” she said.

In her new town, she doesn't have that luxury, but she has contractor friends who supply her with house parts.

“What attracts me to the wood is the color,” she said.

Her permanent pieces are smaller in nature: the counter at Life Alive in Lowell, a floor in an Ayer Lofts condo, and the counter of Enterprise Bank in Tewksbury.

But someday, Volicer hopes to have a larger permanent construction -- a home that she will build herself.

“I really want to build a house, since all my work was a house,” she said. “I'm a hack carpenter, but I could work with others.”