Alyssa Delly’s artwork examines regeneration, resilience, and humanity’s ability to face and conquer debilitating circumstances. Drawing inspiration from personal challenges such as two major reconstructive shoulder surgeries, Alyssa creates abstract compositions that address the restorative power of nature. Due to the physically limiting pain of surgery, as well as the oppressive power of despair, much of her work portrays a sense of restriction while also acknowledging the rejuvenation that is felt when determination overcomes distress.

 

     As an artist who works in many different media including painting, printmaking and sculpture, much of Alyssa’s artwork is process-oriented and focuses on the manipulation of mixed media in a sculptural, interactive manner.  Themes of impermanence and revival are marked by the physicality of processes and materials. For instance, a copper plate used in etching has an extremely fragile surface but is able to endure and portray a great deal of physical force. Alyssa also incorporates rope and its binding character in much of her two-dimensional as well as three-dimensional work to produce feelings of containment or the lasting impression of a restricting experience. To do so, she either uses rope in a bound, constricting manner, or indicates overcoming its force by placing rope in plaster and then ripping it up once it has started to set. 

 

     Having lived in many countries as part of a U.S Foreign Service family, nature performed an important role in Alyssa’s life as a way to familiarize herself with new surroundings. Throughout her artwork, Alyssa uses nature to symbolize progression, change, resilience and renewal. In using plaster, she is able to symbolize these themes because of its materiality and intrinsic understanding as a natural resource. Alyssa uses plaster throughout the majority of her work in an abstract, gestural and skeletal manner. Her artwork blurs the line between two-dimensional and three-dimensional painting through a highly layered process, which recently advanced to applying plaster and structo-lite, a combination of concrete and plaster, on three-dimensional forms made of wood. Alyssa is truly fascinated by the elements and cycles of nature - creation, life, death, decay and regeneration - and how they relate to the progression of humanity.