about

Gina Telcocci is a sculptor and installation artist devoted to exploring the power of the hand-made object. Raised the child of an organic gardener and a jazz musician, Telcocci grew to revere nature and natural processes, and to see, in improvisation, the synthesis of math and beauty as an adaptive strategy for life and art. Working with wire, wood, and other organic and found materials, she uses a variety of assemblage, traditional craft, and weaving techniques. Her sculptures are mostly abstract, with an emphasis on structure and form, but with textural and layered complexity.

Telcocci has received grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Pollock/Krasner Foundation, and the City of Oakland. Her public commissions include installations at the Potrero Hill Library in San Francisco, Albany Memorial Park, Walnut Creek Library, and UNM/Los Alamos. Her art has been exhibited across the United States, Mexico, and South Korea. Recent exhibitions include the de Young Open at the de Young Museum in San Francisco (2020) and a collaborative show with the Stone Soup Project at Gulf Coast State College in Florida (2021).

Currently based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Telcocci continues to create art in her studio, yard, and along the Pecos River, where she also harvests willow for her work. Her practice remains deeply connected to the natural environment and the creative potential of organic materials.

Artist Statement:

Roots, willow, wire, wood, and rusty discarded junk – these are what commonly inspire me, and what often become the materials of my sculpture. Earthy, common, and often scavenged, they are intrinsic to the emotional tone of each piece, and to the ideas embodied in the work. I choose materials, forms and structures instinctively. Contour, line, volume, structure, color, surface, and texture are the “vocabulary” I use when assembling objects and installations.

I fashion things by hand using simple, ancient techniques (basketry, joinery, sewing and weaving, as well as assemblage), which are profoundly rich in meaning and feeling. These old practices are endlessly beautiful examples of the combination of our human tendency to abstract and conceptualize, and our native, animal sensibilities. To me they are a connection to our ancestors and to the world.

My sculptures combine qualities inherent in the materials themselves with the familiarity of traditional crafts. I want them to appear like hybrids of human- and nature-made, to suggest both the known and the unknown. I think my work is about the wonders of the natural world, life cycles, the passage of time and its effects on us, and the vicissitudes of our human relationships to life and to the planet.