Lines & Trees

MacDowell, 2023

In 2023 Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva was awarded a MacDowell fellowship with an Anne Stark Locher & Kurt Locher Fellowship.

At MacDowell, Hadzi-Vasileva took daily two- to three-hour walks, taking photographs and collecting one fallen tree branch each day and photographing the locations of the branches. She then cleaned the branches and gilded them with Dutch metal and created charcoal tracing drawings of the bark. With all of her branches, she created an installation in her studio that she then photographed. Finally, she returned the branches to their original locations and took a final photograph.

The materials for her sculpture are found in the world. Sometimes they remain in situ. Sometimes they are gathered and remade, brought first to the studio, and then on to a place of exhibition. Central to Hadzi-Vasileva's practice is a response to the particularities of place: its history, locale, environment, and communities. She often uses materials that already have an existing link or history to the specific environment, which often results in new and unusual methods of working.

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva worked in the Heinz studio. The icehouse, built of fieldstone in 1914–1915, was a practical part of Marian MacDowell’s plan for a self-sufficient farm. Winter ice cut from a nearby pond was stored here for summer use on the property. Idle since 1940, it was a handsome but outdated farm building. In 1995, Mrs. Drue Heinz, a vice chairman of MacDowell's board of directors, generously donated funds to reclaim the icehouse for use as a sculptors’ studio and establish a studio maintenance fund.