I transform wood fragments into densely packed structures that hold memory, labor, and time. I am drawn to abandoned boards, shims, and shingles for both their history and their purpose: materials once used to level, stabilize, and protect homes before being discarded. I walk neighborhoods, scroll online listings, and search thrift stores for wood marked by use and human touch, materials that carry the imprint of lived experience.
My connection to wood began with my grandfather, a proud Hungarian Jew who emigrated to New York and worked as a glazier. The memory of his narrow shop and long wooden worktable continues to shape my relationship to material. Wood carries for me a lineage of labor, shelter, survival, and perseverance.
Having inherited my grandfather’s determination, I endured the devastation of an unexpected divorce that left me trapped in obsessive cycles of thought, dwelling on the past again and again. Over time and in the studio, I transformed that mental dwelling into a physical language of repetition, layering, and accumulation. What once felt destructive became generative. Sculpture became a way to rebuild my life.
My process is intuitive and immersive. I begin by bringing two boards together, then two more, allowing the work to grow slowly from the inside out, concealing and revealing its own structure as it evolves. The loss of home was especially destabilizing. Finding a new home, a dwelling where I regained peace and stability, became inseparable from the work itself. Shims and shingles, materials designed to stabilize and protect structures, now emerge as central elements in my visual language. Through accumulation and continual adjustment, I construct structures that embody repair, resilience, and renewal.
Leslie Zelamsky (b. 1965, Brooklyn, New York) explores shelter and vulnerability through the language of structure. Her sculptures are densely constructed from common building materials, while her paintings build through layered paint and gesture, examining how the spaces we construct, physically, psychologically, and socially, shape protection and belonging. In her work, dwelling becomes both the structure of home and a repeated act of building and returning. Zelamsky earned her BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, NY, and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, where she was a Patricia Roberts Harris Fellow. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Oxbow and School 33 Art Center. Her work has been exhibited at the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA; the Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA; the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, Philadelphia, PA; Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA; and Boston Sculptors Gallery, Boston, MA. In 2024, Zelamsky appeared as a guest artist on Hawkins: Art and Artists, in conversation with artist and scholar Cynthia Hawkins. She currently lives and works outside Boston, Massachusetts.
