Delia Popa
Delia Popa is a visual artist and works with mediums such as painting, video, installation, performance and participatory projects. Her current research focuses on the representation of landscape and local topography in relation to agriculture, gentrification and climate change. As an art pedagogue and cultural mediator she contributes to the development of life skills and visual culture among children and young people. Since 2013, she has led ArtCrowd-Artists in Education, an art education association. Between 2022 and 2023 Delia was interim coordinator of the Education, Communication, Cultural Projects Department of the National Museum of Art of Romania, where she now works as education specialist. She lives in Bucharest and in Crețești, Ilfov.
Maramureș Residency
20 June – 20 July
About Săcel Residency
I participated in this residency in the village of Săcel, Maramureș, with a physical presence for 10 days. During this time, I visited local cultural attractions, attended workshops and lectures, learned techniques for modeling and painting on clay, and created two ceramic works. I visited the historic churches in the villages of Ieud, Bogdan Vodă, and Dragomirești, the Merry Cemetery in Săpânța, and the towns of Borșa and Sighetul Marmației. I learned about the mural painting in the area, the restoration projects that have taken place in the local churches, and their inclusion in the UNESCO heritage list. In the house-studio where I stayed during the first days, I participated in informal weaving workshops (witnessing the setup of two traditional weaving looms by local weavers), learned to weave on a loom with cotton threads, and practiced braiding with 6, 8, and 12 threads.
At the natural dyeing workshops led by experts Florica Zaharia (Textile Museum of Băița, Hunedoara) and Irina Popoviciu (National Museum of Romanian History, Bucharest), I learned about various types of dyes (turmeric, chenille copper, Persian berry, etc.), and how to dye wool and cotton with them. Additionally, I attended a lecture by Mrs. Zaharia on the optimal conservation of textiles, which included information on conservation procedures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where she worked for over 30 years as a textile conservator and restorer. I also participated in informal ceramics workshops, including the construction of an open ceramic kiln of Neolithic type, led by ceramist Ilie Mihali. I worked on two ceramic pieces inspired by the residency and the Maramureș landscape. The first piece was inspired by cotton spools used in weaving, which I recreated in clay. This piece was then glazed with cobalt blue and fired at 950 degrees Celsius. It is titled “Textile as Ceramic – Tester I” and represents my first work in ceramics, with further iterations planned to refine it.
The second piece is a landscape taken from the area between Maramureș County and Bistrița County, depicting a summer scene with traditional haystacks alongside modern roads and cars. It is titled “Săcel as Shan Shui (Săcel as a Chinese Landscape)” and engages in dialogue with traditional Chinese painted landscapes as well as the blue and white ceramic objects of the same culture. It is painted on commercial porcelain tile and simultaneously evokes contemporary intimate spaces, particularly bathrooms and kitchens, where tile is ubiquitous but devoid of traditional Oriental decorativeness.
Both works were exhibited in the “Linia Izei” exhibition at the Săcel Cultural Center and will be developed further for the final exhibition at Anca Poterasu Gallery in Bucharest.
The AFAR Network project is co-funded by the European Union: ”Views and opionions expressed are however those of the autohor(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsable for them.”