Ellen Ziegler

Statement / My use of the color vermilion began with a powerful childhood memory, which morphed into using only that color for the last six years. Vermilion is replete with associations to family, as well as geology, culture, and art history.

My work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance and artist books. I’ve collaborated with mirror refinishers, drawn on tarpaper and with electric sign-makers’ tools, and performed in Trafalgar Square, standing on a 21-foot pedestal with a video-activated mirror.

I grew up near the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. The memory of the smell inspired me to draw on tar paper while camping near a construction site. Later, I discovered how to make fractal patterns by folding together tar paper and metallic paint. Then, at the Sofia (Bulgaria) Biennale, I used the stinky industrial medium in an installation about fossil fuels and the environment, coming full circle to the tarpits of my childhood.

A mirror’s ability to induce squeamish self-consciousness or trance-like fascination drew me to making mirrors from scratch, stenciling silver drawing and baking them onto glass. Drawing with an electrode on a copper table yields a bizarre line quality only possible through the retro-geekiness of obsolete sign painting machinery.

I collaborated with Patti Smith and Frances McCue, making a single huge artist’s book of their poetry using chemically-enhanced blueprint paper. I wrote each poem with floor cleaner and a crow quill pen, bleaching the words out of the page. We shared the wrenching experience of losing our partners: Patti and Frances responded to tragedy with their poetry, and I with a visual expression of their transcendent language.

The sum of what I’ve learned has everything to do with juxtaposing one thing with another to get a third, and that risk-taking, mistakes and experimentation are a form of collaboration with the unknown. And, for me, boundaries are not useful for innovation.

Curator Deirdre Visser, Desai Matta Gallery, San Francisco: "Ziegler’s creative process mirrors that conjunction of interior and exterior, that place between the psyche, the body, and the world."

Bio / My mother was a ballerina — her bold artistic life gave me permission to discover my own. At Antioch College (Ohio) in the 60’s, I absorbed the ideals of 20th-century avant-garde thinkers from legendary Black Mountain College, then studied Indian classical music in California and India to learn the art of improvisation. In Seattle, I worked as a graphic designer, married, then began making art after my daughter started school. I didn’t go to design or art school, and the freedom this allowed me was both frightening and empowering.

I’ve been an artist for 30 years now, working in many genres: painting, drawing, cyanotype, installation, performance, and artist-made books.

I lost ten family members in the Holocaust – this traumatic history has led me to fight injustice through creative expression, for which my ancestors were murdered. My work is not political, rather an expression of freedom in memoriam.

Website / ellenziegler.com