Barbara Liotta’s sculptures transfix and mesmerize viewers in a visceral way. Made with shards of stone and cord hung from a visible piece of hardware, her contemplative creations inhabit and animate the spaces in which they live.

Liotta draws parallels between her work and the art of ballet. “A ballet teacher once told me, ‘When you do a leap, you go up in the air, do what you’re going to do with your feet, then pause and stretch for a moment. And then you come down,’” she relates.

It’s the pause and the stretch that are thrilling to the artist. “Just as the dancer defies gravity, art is about the power of an impulse to defy the rules,” Liotta explains. “Art that really speaks to me is that traditional reach for something transformative. Like dance, it shouldn’t sit there. You want to catch something airborne.”

Catching something airborne is a fitting way to describe Liotta’s oeuvre. She starts with inanimate material: marble, stone or slate. Once she’s shattered the stones for a sculpture, she ties them with cord and hangs them from pieces of hardware. When she lets the stones fall free—suspended from the overhead structure—they gracefully move within their space. As the artist would say, they begin to dance.

While Liotta is experienced at carving stone, she prefers hauling chunks or slabs of rock to the alley outside her Northwest DC garage-cum-art studio, where she takes a sledgehammer to them to create smaller, imperfect shapes with jagged edges that expose the energy within.

“I look at each piece of stone almost figuratively. I see them as figures and I want them to have a vibrato—like when you play a string instrument, the string vibrates.” she explains. “I want them to breathe. They’re not stiff—they move.”

Liotta sources stone from Tri-State Stone in Bethesda and works with Fernando’s Marble Shop in Rockville to select granite, marble and quartzite. She chooses specimens not only for color and depth but also for their density, translucence, size, shape and what she calls “activity—how the veins move and interact.” As the artist observes, “It’s about finding the right stone to sing in a particular space.”

Commissions are collaborative efforts between Liotta and her client—often an architect or interior designer. First, they visit the space where the artwork will hang, discussing different ideas and locations. Liotta often finds inspiration on site. “There’s a lot of just sitting there, experiencing where the ceiling is, the height of the space, where the walls are, where the life of the room is—and just trying to understand where the energy moves,” she reveals.

Liotta takes photos of the space, prints them and draws her ideas directly on the prints. Then she shares these concepts with her clients and discussions ensue. Clients also help choose stone for each piece. For one commission, Liotta was asked to source rock from a lake in Michigan where the client grew up; another client who taught Classics hired her to create a sculpture using Greek marble.

Born in Cleveland to “art-conscious” parents involved in music and visual arts, Liotta studied fine art and dance at Sarah Lawrence College, where one of her mentors was the renowned dance instructor Bessie Shönberg. “What Bessie taught me in choreography class informs what I do more than anything else I ever learned,” Liotta avows, “from how to look at art to how to have a discerning eye and how to clear out extraneous work.”

Liotta painted throughout college. Eventually, she moved to Washington and dedicated herself to pursuing art full-time 35 years ago. Her early work explored large-scale paintings on unprimed canvas, which she ripped, gathered and hung. However, she wanted more dimensionality than what canvas would allow. “I wanted to make my lines and trajectories out in the air,” she recalls. “I wanted them to soar in three-dimensional space—and I just fell in love with stone.” She began working with large boulders and river rock, then moved on to more delicate, shattered stone and suspended chunks of rock.

Liotta accepts private and public commissions. A large-scale sculpture is on permanent display at Legacy Memorial Park in Washington, DC. The Phillips Collection owns one of her pieces, and her work is shown internationally with the Arts in Embassies program and privately around the United States.

“I see my work as akin to chamber music,” Liotta observes. “There’s a certain austerity—the minimum of elements that weave, blend and soar until they achieve eloquence.”

For more information, visit barbaraliotta.com.

A ripple evoking sculpture, the patina of fine wood grain and unexpected details all are hallmarks of Daniel Rickey’s
handcrafted furniture. Rickey’s work is elegant in its sheer simplicity; clean lines and simple forms make their creation appear deceptively effortless. His chairs, tables, desks and storage pieces are distinctly functional yet decidedly unfussy—demonstrating a masterful art of restraint.

Refreshingly unpretentious, Rickey infuses something extra into each piece; heart might very well be the word. It’s clear he loves making furniture and respects the medium of wood. “A beautiful piece of wood can be intoxicating,” he reflects. “It’s unique and dictates what it wants to be. In many cases, I’m the first one to see the grain of a board. I feel it’s my duty to give that piece its best life.”

The life of his products is of supreme importance to the 33-year-old woodworker. “I’m inspired by making something beautiful but simple, something that’s going to last,” he reveals. “I love putting the date on a piece I’ve made because I want somebody years from now to know how old it is. I want them to see that its maker is speaking through it.”

Whether working with walnut, white oak, maple or cherry—all personal favorites—Rickey factors in how the wood will age when he conceives his designs and handles the material. “Wood is constantly alive and moving—it’s changing with the seasons,” he explains. “So when I’m taking material off the face of it, I do it over the course of several days or a week to make sure the wood has a chance to acclimate to its surroundings without cupping or bowing.”

Rickey has nearly two decades of experience. The award-winning designer was born in Cleveland and moved around with his family, eventually settling in Richmond. His father first introduced him to woodworking as a youngster; Rickey fondly remembers building tree forts with his friends. He went on to study woodworking at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he fell in love with the craft. After apprenticing under Andrew Flint, he completed a two-year program in fine and creative woodworking at Rockingham Community College and opened his own studio in 2009.

Tracing his inspiration back to modern Danish and Scandinavian design, Rickey feels those genres influenced his dedication to traditional home design craftsmanship, comfort and a pleasing aesthetic that will endure trends and the passage of time. Ideas for new designs often wake him up at night. He makes notes and sketches while they’re fresh in his memory.

Whether he’s embarking on one of his own design concepts or on a commission for a residential or commercial client, Rickey sketches the piece multiple times. He then merges his sketches with computer drawing programs that enable him to execute his final draft with the greatest precision. With the computer, he says, “I can visualize it, move the camera around and see it from all angles—it’s like building the piece without actually building it.”

He goes through as many renditions as possible to get it right, then makes a prototype or scale model. He might even build a life-size prototype out of cheap lumber before going final. When certain his piece will work, he moves on to finer, premium wood.

In his 7,000-square-foot, flat-brick warehouse studio in Richmond’s up-and-coming Scott’s Addition neighborhood, Rickey is surrounded by tons of lumber, heavy machinery and hand tools; fans whir overhead. It is here he mills raw timber into smooth board and makes templates for the parts in order to replicate them. Depending on the piece, he cuts the joinery before cutting the parts to ensure everything will mesh seamlessly. And though the joinery fits tightly together, he still adds glue as a precaution. “A piece of furniture gets moved around a lot,” he observes. “It’s all about the life of the product.”

With the joinery done and the parts cut, the piece is ready for assembly and finishing. Unless a client requests a darker finish, stain or paint color, Rickey says, “I strive to make my pieces look as though they have no finish on them. They’re silky smooth, but you can still feel and see their wood grain. I prefer not to impart color into the finish.”

The craftsman has an affinity for local wood. On a recent project, a client wanted a 42-by-96-inch walnut table that would open to 120 inches. He designed it with a trestle base and a butterfly leaf so one person can easily enlarge it. He found engineering the piece as exciting as seeing the tree from which it was cut. He selected the walnut from a millworker in Richmond who saws his own walnut logs. “It was perfectly matching Virginia walnut,” he recalls, “and I could tell the client I shook hands with the sawyer.”

For more information, visit danielrickeyfurniture.com; 804-687-2313.