Each month, the high school’s Visual Arts Department selects student artists to showcase in their 3-D and 2-D art categories. The Bradford is featuring the works of Emily Rich ’25 (3-D, Metals) and Agnese DelVecchio ’25 (2-D, Photography), the September Artists of the Month.
Emily Rich ’25: Metals
Working with what she has, and whatever it becomes, Emily Rich has become skilled at grappling with metalworking, a medium that certainly gets unwieldy at times. Despite the craft’s unpredictability, Rich never comes into the metals studio without a clear, confident intention.
“Everything has to be very intricately planned so that you don’t end up trying to put something together and then melting another one of your solder seams,” she said. “I usually sketch things out, but I tend to be able to visualize things more in a 3-D lens than a 2-D one. So I always like making samples, so that I can actually feel what it’s going to look like.”
Rich has gauged the niches of metals over a course of five years, and has spent her junior and senior year mastering it as an intensive. Using the medium to deal with nature and anatomy, there is a deep-rooted polarity that is almost basic to her work.
“My pieces have to do with the mix of growth and decay, and life and unnatural forms,” Rich said. “When I take something that is a quite literal, alive form, I think that there’s something about making it out of a material that’s so industrial that really is able to capture nuance.”
In “Heavy Heart” (2023), Rich uses the chase and repoussé technique to achieve fine low-relief details. She indented her metal sheets with hammers, going back and forth between the positive and negative sides until she created the physical details she had envisioned.
“Heavy Heart” (2023), Rich’s copper anatomical heart, called upon that collision between industrial and organic. She knew that she wanted to create it since her sophomore year, while still in Metals II – and it became one of her summer sketches that she would bring back to the studio the following year.
“I was just waiting for the opportunity to make it happen. I didn’t know how it was going to work, what technique I was going to use, but I knew I wanted to make a heart,” she said. Rich, who also takes a strong liking to biology, created it as a raw mesh of her combined interests.
Rich’s art has roots in her personal background, too. Her grandparents live on the Belgian coast, where her grandfather is a well-known artist and sculptor. She finds inspiration during her annual summer visits there – in their beach walks, or collections of sea glass and sand dollars – and brings them back to Wellesley.
“Riding the Waves” (2023) is a ring made with Russian filigree, thin strips of metal Rich twisted to look like waves, and with a bezel, which she customized to contain a piece of sea glass she collected.
Her ring, “Riding the Waves” (2023), conjures back Belgium’s coast. “To incorporate that right back into my pieces is really special,” she said. In the bezel, she cut out the silhouette of a turtle that becomes visible when the ring is put up to a light.
“I don’t really know where I came up with that,” Rich said. “I think I really liked the idea of being able to incorporate something “nature” into it, and something “ocean” to go into the sea glass. I thought that that would work well with that.”
In one of only five high school metals studios in the state, she never takes the art for granted. Ever since Rich, who has worked with other artistic mediums as well, took on the rare opportunity to do metals, she has continued to investigate the form-function relationship between her material and her thematic matter.
“I like being able to create something that I can feel with my hands and that I have full control over, and though it’s the same with other mediums, it somehow feels different when you have the physical capability to bend things into what positions you want them to be,” she said. “Once I discovered metals, I never went back.”
Agnese DelVecchio ’25: Photography
Agnese DelVecchio almost didn’t become a photographer, until she came across the elective on the high school’s course catalog in ninth grade, looking for something unique to add to her freshman courseload. What began as another class in the cycle schedule soon became second nature to her, and she continued taking it up to the intensive level as an upperclassman.
“I had tried a lot of other [electives] that I hadn’t liked, so I was like, ‘let’s try photography, that’s for me,’” DelVecchio said. “And I tried it, and I loved it.”
She continued to experiment with the new calling outside of the classroom, drawing upon the creative processes of photography content creators online. Eventually, DelVecchio developed a style that fused color choices into the unique scenes she composed, whether candid or planned.
“I really like shooting places with a lot of color. I really like doing things with light,” she said. She actualized those elements most signature to her photography as a junior intensive, focusing one of her independent concentration projects on lighting and silhouettes.
“Nightlight,” part of DelVecchio’s junior concentration, replicates the warm hues of a golden hour sunset with artificial lighting, resulting in an oxymoronic portrait of her classmate, Abby Coleman ’25.
One of those photos, “Nightlight,” was supposed to use only the natural light that seeped into DelVecchio’s own room. When she couldn’t achieve her desired colors with just the sunset outdoors, she had to get creative to truly bring out the vibrancy.
“It wasn’t working, so I ended up closing my shades, and just used this light from my dad to get warmer tones, the yellows and oranges. I had my little brother hold a reflector, get it on [Abby’s] face, too,” DelVecchio said. “In the end, I really like how it turned out. Sometimes the initial vision isn’t the same, but it’s kind of the vibe, and I love it.”
DelVecchio commits to her original palette, by all experimental means possible – and she recognizes that those strategies will always change. “When something doesn’t work out with the color, I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to figure out how to improvise on this one,’” she said.
In addition to organized shoots with familiar faces, she also dabbles in the opposite type of shooting: candid photography. In “One Walk”, taken in Lisbon, Portugal, DelVecchio worked with the natural cityscape she saw through her viewfinder, and photo-smithed it later, in Adobe Lightroom.
Taken on a trip for her church while out with friends, DelVecchio had nailed down her composition of “One Walk” on the street, but got to also bring a new dimension of aesthetic into her work during the post-processing phase.
“It was just the first time I had ever traveled across the ocean, basically. I took this photo and I looked at it in my viewfinder, and it looked fine,” said DelVecchio. “But it was after I edited it, that I realized the power of editing: how much you could tint the colors, remove the wires – the little stuff like that makes it better.”
She is doing more work now with analog photography, using Ilford HP5; a monochrome film, and a radically different medium at that. “I’ve spent so much time with color that I kind of forgot how much I love shooting with black and white, too. And I love the grain on the film.”
It’s in no way a departure from her color work, though – rather, a continuation of it. When she wasn’t satisfied with the original colors of one of her photo sets, the photography teacher, Mr. Doug Johnson, recommended she do a combination of both color and monochrome photography. Black and white, as “non-colors” to DelVecchio, unlock an entirely new palette to experiment with.
DelVecchio aspires to continue photography in a recreational capacity, at a casual setting in college. “For all the schools I’m looking at, I’m making sure they have a sort of club, at least to keep it in my cycle,” she said. “It’s so nice to look back at and have all these photos that I’ve taken already.”