Nadya Volicer, 26, peers through one of her creations. Her sculptures are made from scraps of wood and other found objects culled from trash piles destined for the dump. "Home Spun" is an example of Ms. Volicer's large installations. Measuring 11-by-9-12 feet, the sculpture was assembled at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln. The artist, who grew up in Bedford and now lives in Marion, holds bits of found wood in her New Bedford studio.
Nadya Volicer is turned on by trash. Yours, mine or somebody else's.
We're not talking here about egg shells, coffee grinds and empty soup cans. The kind of rubbish Ms. Volicer likes are scraps left over from, say, a house renovation. Contractors come in with crowbars and start ripping out wooden planks, moldings, boards, door frames and plywood, and then leave it in a pile for the dump.
That's the kind of trash that puts Ms. Volicer in seventh heaven.
In 2001, Nadya Volicer, 26, earned a BFA degree in sculpture from the Massachusetts College of Art and is currently making a name for herself in the New England art scene.
A Marion resident, Ms. Volicer (pronounced VOL-it-ser) has had her work exhibited at Lincoln's DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, as well as at Lowell's Whistler House Museum of Art. Closer to home, Ms. Volicer contributed to the recent group exhibit "Found It" at New Bedford's ArtWorks!
She has been written up in Sculpture Magazine, a national publication, and has won such art prizes as the Helen Blair Crosbie Sculpture Award and the Foundation Auction Award, both from Mass Art.
In 1999, when Ms. Volicer was a junior at the Boston college, she decided to combine her fondness for found wood with a need to create sculptural spaces.
"The idea of turning found objects into art is nothing new," she says. "There's a whole history behind it."
Indeed. Consider artist Marcel Duchamp's groundbreaking exhibit in 1917 -- a white porcelain urinal, which he signed R. Mutt.
Contemporary artist Robert Rauschenberg's "Minitia," currently on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a free-standing "combine" and contains newspaper, plastic, fabric, a mirror on a braided wire and wood.
But more on Ms. Volicer.
She hates to waste anything. Even her wood scraps show up again and again in her work. "I recycle everything," she says.
And colors attract her.
"I think it's because I can't paint," she says. "I'm at the mercy of what I find for my colors. Old painted planks, with outdated blue or green or pink, are very exciting to me."
The fact that the objects she finds come from people's homes is a big plus to her. Everything she creates is conceived with the overriding object of building a space that can be called a home of sorts.
She calls these sculptures Big Boxes and Little Boxes.
So far, Ms. Volicer has built 10 of the Big Boxes, which she names installations. Each is titled. "Spilt Milk" and "Beyond Walls" are a few of their names.
Then there's one called "Home Spun," which she assembled at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.
It was big -- approximately 11-by-9-by-12 feet. It stood in a gallery hallway. After the installation, the piece was taken apart.
Created from scraps of painted wood, the structure featured a walkable floor that enabled visitors to pass through it.
"It's a rip curl, like a surfer would go through," she explains. "It's not parallel, but arched."
The work took 2 1/2 weeks to construct and another week to install.
Nadya Volicer was born in Boston and grew up in Bedford. She is the daughter of Czechoslovakian-born Dr. Lasalav Volicer, an Alzheimer's disease researcher, and Beverly Beers, a biostatistics professor at UMass Lowell.
Ms. Volicer can remember wanting to be an artist when she was 8, but didn't make up here mind to go into art until her senior year in high school. Her parents, however, didn't think art was a very stable profession.
But she remembered being "pretty stubborn" and went ahead and enrolled at Mass Art, telling her folks she would be studying graphic design.
While at school, she lived in Boston's Mission Hill area, where she found everybody's storage space was limited. Consequently, home renovations were going on everywhere. For Ms. Volicer, Tuesday and Friday nights the streets were like a candy store of discarded lumber from people's homes.
In her junior year, she started collecting the materials her neighbors would throw out.
"That was the beginning," she says.
Her fascination for things historical was augmented by her father's interest in things with stories behind them.
"Like Dad had Army swords that his father had given him. They were hanging on a wall. He also had old, strange-looking letters in his desk drawer. Most were written in Czech, but they were wonderful to look through. And my grandfather had a wonderful stamp collection, lots of colorful stamps from different countries," Nadya recalls.
"Old things. Things with some sort of history. Unique things you couldn't buy today."
Today, Dr. Volicer divides his professional time between Prague and Florida. Once, when Nadya visited him in Czechoslovakia, he gave her an assignment: to build an entertainment center and bar for his living room. The project stands there today.
Numerous, church-like wooden spires, which Ms. Volicer found in her travels around the Czech Republic, top the piece. Replicas of miniature historical figures from the Orloj, the ancient clock in Prague's Old Town Square, highlight the whole. An exhibit of models with intertwined hands and feet in reference to prints by the Czech art nouveau artist, Mucha, are also prominent.
The sculptor created another installation, this one titled "Curtain Call," for the Whistler House Museum of Art.
Measuring 10-by-18-by-10 feet, the piece appears to represent just what the title calls for: two draped, ceiling-to-floor theatrical curtains. They are, however, constructed not of fabric but of hundreds of colored wooden scraps hung together with fishing line.
In 2000, Ms. Volicer spent a semester at the Glasgow School of Art. But there her penchant for household building materials came to an unexpected halt.
"All the houses there are made out of stone," she says.
Ms. Volicer settled in Marion last year when her boyfriend, sculptor Ryan Walker, began graduate work at UMass Dartmouth.
She's still hunting through curbside heaps (she says Fairhaven has yielded some treasures). But a few years ago, Ms. Volicer learned that hunting through trash can lead to misunderstandings.
She was on the Greek island of Skopelos, attending yet another summer workshop. One day she spied a collection of flotsam and jetsam that had been beached by the Aegean.
One object was a sea-soaked packing crate with Greek writing on it. Another was two metal bowls that looked as if they had been fused together.
She returned to her lodgings, thrilled by the discovery. The owner, who neither spoke nor understood English, was excited, too --only not in the same way.
"He thought it was a bomb!" Nadya reports.
Ms. Volicer was soon back at Mass Art.