Lillian is a Maryland based, interdisciplinary artist, educator and curator. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the American University of Rome where she graduated as Summa Cum Laude. There, she gained an appreciation for ancient art and relics, reflected in her current body of sculptural work.  She received an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art, from the School of the Museum of Fine Art at Tufts University. There, she integrated a classical approach into a contemporary practice.

She recently received the Choptank 500 Grant and was an Exhibitions Fellow at the Tufts University Art Galleries. Her work has been included in several recent group exhibitions in Maryland, including, The Circle Gallery, and a solo exhibition at the High Street Gallery. She has shown internationally and across the US, at the The Via Masina Gallery, in Rome, and the Autry Museum of the Southwest in Los Angeles.

About the Work

She makes artwork in multiple mediums, including marble, small metal casting, photography and plaster.

Lillian enjoys exploring traditional artistic practices and processes and my primary sculptural material is Scagliola. It’s a 17th century, Italian, composite material. It is comprised of plaster and dry pigments, and known as imitation marble. Once cured, the plaster is sealed with wax. Traditionally, artisans would meticulously sand the surface until it was smooth and reflective, like cut and polished marble. In her work, she prefers to leave the form fractured and the surface in a state of deterioration, like a century old ruin.

Her Scagliola inspired forms exist somewhere between ancient architecture and the natural world. Ancient architecture is a marker of time passed and it’s often cracked or broken. Theres’s beauty in the broken and that connected to her own grief and healing from the loss of a sibling at a young age.

Previous to perusing visual arts, Lillian was an actor and spent years performing improv. This experience wired her for experimentation and play, and today she expresses it through the art making process. When she creates her stone like sculptures, any fracture in the plaster becomes a guide and redirection to it’s ultimate form. Sometimes she’s inspired by structures in architecture that slowly obscure as I create. Other times, she begins from designs in nature that slowly gain structural integrity.

Her photography is painterly and captures the vibrancy of inanimate objects. She sources these objects from second hand stores or creates them. In the Loyal Companion series, she built a steel rock sculpture and shot it in different human centered locations, like the Laundromat. Similar to her sculptural practice, Lillian works from a place of intuition. In the series, what started out as a mediation on objecthood, turned into an endearing, loyal and sometimes melancholy relationship with the ‘rock’ sculpture. It became a symbol for the invisible weight we all carry.