The Sum of Their Parts

Cathy Della Lucia’s fantastical mixed-media sculptures tell complicated stories

Cathy Della Lucia’s Grocery Conveyor: 6 HMart Reliefs (2025) Baltic birch plywood, hardwood, aluminum, 3D-printed polylactic acid, flocking, vinyl, epoxy clay, aqua resin, paint, stain, dye, varnish, hardware; 96 x 4 in. Photo by Mel Tiang

The Sum of Their Parts

Cathy Della Lucia’s fantastical mixed-media sculptures tell complicated stories

May 31, 2026

Marc Chalufour

Cathy Della Lucia’s Boston studio looks like a furniture maker’s shop. Table saws fill the center of the room. Vises dangle from a rack, and routers and sanders hang on a wall.
Boards and wood scraps sit on shelves and jut from plastic bins. Black letters scrawled on their end grain hint at their varieties: WAL, ASH, MAHOG.

Della Lucia (’17) mixes wood with ceramic, plastic, and metal to create intricate modular sculptures that can resemble artisanal building toys or abstract medical models. The wood faces a long journey before it’s added to a sculpture, which she says can take 2,000 hours to complete. Two recent examples stand in a corner of the studio: Yellow Light Brawl and Pump-King Keeper. They’re both about five feet tall, slender, and composed of carefully sculpted pieces of wood, vinyl, and ceramic and cheap consumer products. They could be three-dimensional renderings of Dr. Seuss’ creations.

Each piece of a Della Lucia sculpture is clearly differentiated from the next by color and textures. They’re joined using a range of techniques, including pegs, joints, and magnets. But what, exactly, each piece is made of requires scrutiny.

Left: Yellow Light Brawl (2024) Wood, plywood, 3D-printed PLA, acrylic, motorcycle jack, silicone, paint, stain, dye, magnets, vinyl, varnish; 63 x 21 in. Photo by Bruce R. Wahl. Right: Pump-King Keeper (2023) Wood, plywood, ceramic, glaze, paint, stain, dye, magnets, varnish; 63 x 21 in. Photo by Gregor Hazel.

“I’m hoping you’ll ask, ‘Is it plastic? Is that ceramic?’ I think it brings you in closer,” she says. “It makes you really think about the importance of the material. If you think it’s plastic, does that change the value of it?”

By leaning in, Della Lucia hopes, the viewer will begin to appreciate each component. “They’re fragments of statements,” she says. Her pieces also invite touch, even though that’s typically forbidden at an exhibit. The smooth finishes and curvy shapes could be hand-holds at a rock gym. “It’s supposed to be a lure,” she says. “I want the tease of that.”

She calls her sculptures vessels because they hold so many ideas. She finds inspiration everywhere and mixes the personal and the pop cultural, the lowbrow and the highbrow. Each sculpture is a time capsule.

Life Embeds Itself

Della Lucia was born in Korea and adopted by a family in the United States. She traces her interest in disguising one material as another to “a lot of confusion about my identity—what it meant to be Asian while thinking I was white.” But not all of the references in her work are so personal. Gambling, sports, fishing, stock markets, inexpensive IKEA furniture, toys, and weapons have all provided inspiration. Everyday encounters and experiences are also fodder for her work.

Zero Days to Expiration (2020) Plywood, various hardwoods, porcelain, Hydrocal, milk paint; 31 x 40 in. (with base) Photo by Bruce R. Wahl

The color scheme and name of Pump-King Keeper come from the green and orange outfits of US soccer goalie Alyssa Naeher and a monthlong pumpkin diet Della Lucia once went on. “My skin looked so good,” she says,“but I can’t eat pumpkin anymore.”

A series of capsules on Yellow Light Brawl resembles the magazine on a gun. The sculpture rests on a red motorcycle jack, a token of cheap consumer products that Della Lucia had to shim to hold steady.

She never begins a piece with a single overarching idea. Rather, she collects inspiration over the course of the months it takes to complete a sculpture. “There’s so much process in them—breaking them down, putting them back together, and the move from digital to physical, back and forth—that, through that time, everyday life embeds itself.”

Working in Wood

Della Lucia used to work at a smaller scale, combining materials like plywood, porcelain, and clay to create abstract reliefs. But she wanted to go bigger and needed a material more suited to her iterative style of creation. In 2020, she cleared her schedule of shows and took a year off from making new work. She launched into a self-guided study of woodworking. “It was a lot of YouTube, a lot of trial and error,” she says.

Left: Give Me Gravy Tonight (2022) Plywood, hardwood, stoneware, earthenware, stain, underglaze, Hydrocal; 34 x 18 in. Courtesy of the Artist. Right: Fridge Landscape 1 (2024) Wood, plywood, paint, dye, ceramic, hardware, varnish; 33 x 25 x 3.5 in. Photo by Mel Tiang

One of her first new pieces was Zero Days to Expiration. She had recently discovered that her IKEA table was made from honeycombed cardboard and particle board—not real wood. She wanted to create something intended for a long life and multiple uses, to counter the impermanence and waste of our consumer culture. “It was a fascination with how much stuff we surround ourselves with that you can’t even reuse,” she says. The sculpture uses her trademark structure—with pieces of wood, plywood, porcelain, and Hydrocal (a type of plaster)—and has elements that look like human joints and resemble a rock formation. Playing with the modularity of cheap furniture, she designed a base that the sculpture can sit on or be stored in.

With Grocery Conveyor: 6 HMart Reliefs, Della Lucia returned to reliefs, but on a grander scale. Based on drawings she had done in grocery stores, the piece is composed of what she calls her “HMart” reliefs. They feature the greens, yellows, and browns of a produce aisle and the textures of seeds, grains, and fleshy fruit. She used a variety of woods and other materials, including epoxy, vinyl, aluminum, and 3D-printed plastic. They connect with jagged teeth at some joints and organic curves that dovetail at others.

There’s so much process in them—breaking them down, putting them back together, and the move from digital to physical, back and forth—that, through that time, everyday life embeds itself.”
Cathy Della Lucia (CFA’17)

HMart represented an evolution of Della Lucia’s woodwork as well as her use of technology. To design it, she used Rhino, a three-dimensional modeling software, for the first time. Digital rendering allowed her to experiment with scale and to test joints before she picked up a tool in her studio.

Della Lucia hopes that the complexity of her pieces elicit layered emotions.

“I hope people think about those little parts that make up the whole and that it reminds them of something that brings them grief and something that brings them joy and something they hate and something they love—how those things come together and coexist as one,” she says.

Constituent Parts

This 2025 exhibition curated by Phillippa Pitts in 808 Gallery highlighted a decade-long conversation between Della Lucia (CFA’17) and Nicholas Mancini (CFA’17), who met as MFA students at Boston University. Together, their works invite us to rethink how we make sense of the world around us.

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