Artist invites you to talk to her as she creates mini sculptures in Northern Liberties

Artist and graphic designer Lydia Ricci makes tiny sculptures from scraps, rarely using tweezers, and in her new show, Come Talk To Me at Huddle, Northern Liberties’ newest community art space, invites visitors to sit down and chat with her while she works with her glue gun, bits of cardboard, old record shards – and whatever else she can find in her scavenges.

“Certain tools that seem too meticulous, I feel guilty about using,” Ricci, 46, said. “I only bring tweezers at the end to clean something up. I don’t buy scraps. That’s cheating. It doesn’t seem as authentic.”

Much of Ricci’s collection of materials comes from her father Tom Ricci’s house in King of Prussia, where she grew up with her older sister and mother, who died after a long illness when the sisters were in their late teens. Ever since, Ricci’s father has been saving belongings, veering into near-hoarding.

“I never throw anything away,” Tom said at Come Talk To Me’s opening earlier this month. “And it’s kind of like some type of satisfaction that someone is getting some use out of all this. So I’ve resolved that until I die, I’m never going to throw anything away, ever.”

Perhaps it is this preservation of the detritus of daily life from a family’s history that lends Ricci’s work such a sense of nostalgia, a word that comes up often when speaking to people about her sculptures.

At Ricci’s opening, her miniscule sculptures lined up on shelves along one wall of the industrial space, her work table scattered with papers, pieces of plastic, a glue gun, a disco ball, and even a relic from the Upper Merion School District from 1981 that said Ricci had been evaluated, was “not exceptional” and was “not in need of special education at this time. Nostalgia was a word that surfaced often in conversation.

Ryan Aungst, 44, who works in the Huddle building, said his favorite of Ricci’s sculptures was the little cigarette vending machine, complete with levers to pull and multi-colored slivers of paper to indicate different brands.

“Everything here is what I like to call it perfectly imperfect,” Aungst said. “And the nostalgia! Even though she's just randomly grabbing cardboard and whatever she has at her at her hands, she is nailing the details. And that vending machine just has all those little details. And that just brings back so many memories to me, of being, well, I'm not a smoker, but just always seeing those machines. They were all over the place.”

(Ricci also makes stop-motion animation of her sculptures, sometimes accompanied by text or sound, and even had a “tiny” movie of her work in the 2019 San Francisco Film Festival, entitled “Don’t You Forget About Me: 30 years of scraps transformed into tiny tributes to the mundane.”)

Ricci has always pursued side art projects to compliment and “feel some freeness” from her daytime work as a graphic designer. She’s done printmaking and collage, but it wasn’t until moving out of the city to Narberth and having her first child — and having to drive — that she became obsessed with making tiny sculptures of cars.

The first was the family’s ancient green Dodge that was unpredictable in winter weather, and Ricci recalls her mother telling them to rub the seats of the car to warm it up. Soon Ricci was working out of a cluttered room, usually at night when her husband and two boys were asleep, the TV on, gluing and clipping and snipping into the wee hours until she had completed another one of her mini blasts from the past that represents some kind of memory to her.

“They all mean different things, but they’re definitely a moment that’s just a memory — a moment in life that all of a sudden surfaces, and I realize that the thing was there, and in order to communicate the moment I build the thing,” Ricci explained.

Kristina Behler, 47, Ricci’s older sister, was moved by seeing all of Ricci’s pieces stretching out in a line along the wall.

“I mean, that was our car,” Behler said. “That was our VCR. That was exactly the photo-mat that was in the Genuardi’s parking lot where we would get our photos… And that's the aquarium where we had two gerbils, one of which died. And I always said, ‘Lydia, your gerbil died,’ which who could tell the difference.

“It’s so interesting to me what things she picked that stood out in her mind. But I can't picture what she's missing.”

11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday, through Aug. 1, Huddle, 338 Brown St., http://fromscraps.com/come-talk-to-me