If the visual arts were a rock band, sculpture would be its drums. It’s the medium that arguably requires the greatest commitment of physicality, materials and equipment; it can be loud, it takes up a lot of space, and your mom will not thank you for practicing in the living room. But it’s also the oldest and most fundamental. Its concerns — weight, tension, gesture, balance — reverberate through all other visual arts.
An exhibition based not on theme or content but instead on the very broad question of how artists articulate those concerns might seem like it would take several years and the wing of a major museum to explore. But Jacquie O’Brien, curatorial assistant and gallery coordinator at BCA Center in Burlington and a practicing sculptor herself, has done it very well with “What’s the Difference? Sculptural Ideas,” a show she has guest-curated in the art center’s smaller, second-floor gallery, on view through June 20.
O’Brien narrows her focus to works by two artists: Cathy Della Lucia, who teaches at Boston College and received a prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation fellowship last year; and Lee Williams, a former filmmaker from South Wales, in the United Kingdom, who now lives in Shaftsbury. Both present works made primarily from wood, and both have a strong sense of color. Mostly, though, the artists create objects that engage serious formal considerations, but they do it with levity and a good dose of humor.
Williams started sculpting about five years ago after his move to Vermont, O’Brien said. He was inspired by newfound access to the woods and to significantly more space than he’d ever had in the UK. His sculptures often begin with sticks or logs he finds on his walks. Sometimes he lashes these together with string. Others he pins together with dowels, but more often the dowels become a visual element of their own, sticking out like quills on a hedgehog.
Williams draws on Welsh folktales, and there is a definite animistic, ancient vibe to many of his sculptures. “Slowly Bending to My Will,” a five-foot-tall assemblage featuring a hollow tube of birchbark perched atop spindly legs, gives the impression of a creature about to speak but poised to run away or collapse onto the forest floor.
“Between Laughter and Despair” incorporates a log shaped vaguely like a horse’s skull with long, twisting antlers held in place with big orange bolts. Underneath it, orange-edged plywood sandwiches a lumpy, coal-black material atop a squared-off block of wood on oversize orange casters. The whole thing is reminiscent of a Mari Lwyd — a Welsh puppet made from a horse’s skull that challenges Christmas revelers to rhyming contests — but updated and modern: It’s ready for a rap battle at a Home Depot.
Williams uses vibrant color to keep the work fresh and contemporary without abandoning any of its natural mystery. He researches color, O’Brien said, and is fascinated by hues such as hot pink — a color that doesn’t exist as a wavelength in the light spectrum but that we perceive as our brains amalgamate red, orange and purple. Williams deploys his palette in saturated moments that draw the eye through his compositions, like bright poppies emerging from leaf litter.
Williams’ sense of gesture — most especially in “Correspondence,” a large sculpture resting on a single point and propped against a wall — comes through as though he were drawing. In this work, which incorporates plexiglass rods and dirty, decaying canvas, he prompts viewers to see the resonances and contrasts between disparate materials, the echoes in their forms, their weirdnesses both found and constructed.
Della Lucia’s sculptures are composed of parts and junctures, each seemingly an entire boisterous conversation. They are modular, assembled from individual pieces in wood, ceramic, metal and other materials as though they were the strangest Lego sets ever made.
In an artist talk at Saint Michael’s College, Della Lucia described her process and history: She took a year off from teaching to learn woodworking, including the many Japanese joinery techniques that she now uses. She said taking the pieces apart and putting them back together again many times while creating each sculpture informs the work, as each piece’s shape limits the others. She stressed how works in her medium always relate to the human body. That includes not only what the finished sculpture looks like but also the tactile, physical actions of carving and the inherent vitality of the material. As she put it, “Wood is actually still alive: It’s breathing; it’s moving.”
Wood is actually still alive: It’s breathing;
Cathy Della Lucia
it’s moving.
Some of the works, such as “Trolling (strawberries and burnt tongues),” reference the body directly and sensually. The 31-inch-high sculpture is built on a metal pole used to secure deep-sea fishing rods; the pieces are stacked on it as though on a shish kebab skewer, with lumpy bits, protuberances and orifices in sickly pink, fluorescent red and bone-like white suggesting, but not stating, the awkward dangers of all kinds of trolling.
Other sculptures are almost personifications of ADHD. Della Lucia showed pictures of her wholly chaotic studio and drawings done of the contents of her fridge, made while standing there with the door open (exactly, she said, as her dad told her not to). Within the drawings, she identifies interesting abstract shapes, then finds bits and bobs in the studio that can be carved to match. The resulting pieces are complex and intricate, such as the two interlocking forms in “Watermelon-Dragonfruit Pus,” which are from a larger, six-part relief based on groceries from the Korean market H Mart. Organizing the visual chaos offers a cure for it: The clever joinery renders each assemblage soothingly complete.
That’s also true of the varied references and ideas that make their way into Della Lucia’s work. She is Korean by birth but was adopted by strict Catholic Midwestern parents, and investigations of that identity run through pieces such as “Give Me Gravy Tonight,” its title a reference to a song from Sister Act.
Others focus on absurdities or failures. They include “Privacy Gate With Invisible Crutch,” a wall-mounted sculpture made of partially clear plexiglass that provides no actual privacy whatsoever — like American bathroom stalls, she said — and folds against the wall as a tongue-in-cheek nod to art buyers who think sculpture’s footprint is too inconvenient.
That fact — the physical presence of the medium — forces us to interact with it in a different way, making us navigate past it to walk around a room, demanding acknowledgement. As O’Brien said, “The sculpture is living there, almost as a person, because it takes up space.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘Different’ Strokes | A show at BCA Center offers a fresh take on sculpture”
This article appears in May 27 • 2026.
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