Lauren DiCioccio’s Abstract Sculptures Are Full of Character

Lauren DiCioccio creates abstract sculptures using hand-sewing and hand-embroidery. To make each piece, DiCioccio works from the inside out, starting with perhaps a handful of stuffing and a square of felt, and building shapes and gestures that are determined by the material and her own instinct to manipulate it. After a coherent series of structures develops, she carefully upholsters, embroiders, wraps, weaves, or embellishes each form individually until it has developed its own identity and posture and thereby, personality. 

“The main goal of the work is to use the alchemy of sculpture to take the inanimate and very simple materials of cloth and stuffing and sometimes wood and turn them into something alive with personality,” she further relayed in an interview with Textile Artist. “It’s among the simplest and the most complex ideas an artist works with and I am finding it infinitely interesting.”

With a formal background in painting, DiCioccio started experimenting with fiber in 2005. According to DiCioccio, she began embroidering and sewing with no prior experience outside of doing cross-stitch projects and watching her mom hand-sew Halloween costumes when she was a child. 

“My work has taken a bit of a turn in recent years since I started making these more abstract forms, rather than the more literal or representation pieces I’d made for about ten years,” she reflects. “I’ve never really taken a class in sculpture or studied sculpture so when I started I was just making objects. Now I think a lot about what it takes to make a good sculpture and how these object function in space, and that’s been a really big development.”

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Made some lil 3D prints of my sculptures ➿

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“Power Suit” 17” x 10” x 14” 2018

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