Zelda Zinn

Zelda Zinn was born with a crayon in her mouth and a book in her hand. She grew up in Texas drawing and dreaming up contraptions. She fell in love with photography at age 10, and has only rarely regretted it. She attended an arts high school before studying the classics at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM. She then went on to study art at the University of New Mexico, receiving an MA and an MFA in photography. Zinn taught photography for many years, and loved to make photo enthusiasts of her students. These days, she likes to get her hands dirty with printmaking, painting, and making sculpture, in addition to digital and alternative process photography.

She was fortunate to be awarded artist’s residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Vermont Studio Center, Akron Soul Train, The Morgan Conservatory for Paper, The Arctic Circle (twice), and La Wayaka Current in Chile’s Atacama Desert. They have had a profound impact on her thinking, technique, and art making. Zinn has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally since the 1990’s. She continues to expand her experiments with materials and process into glass, 3D printing, and collage, and to be amazed by the worlds of nature and the imagination.

Altered Arctic It is hard to consider the Arctic without thinking about what the north has represented in the collective imagination. For centuries, it was the site of expeditions and often heartbreak, where so many lost their lives in the quest of conquering the unknown and bringing glory and perhaps wealth to their homelands. Seeing this barren, majestic land in person, I thought of those who were left at home, not knowing whether their loved ones were alive or dead. I came back from the Arctic with small photos of a vast, unknowable place. This barren land with its glaciers and icebergs signified geological time, “deep time,” but I could only experience it in human time. The immensity and strange stillness of the frozen landscape were constant reminders of how small and impermanent we humans are, and what changes we have wrought during our short tenure. My photos were an attempt to grasp this mind-bending place and what it might mean.

As a way to make sense of my pictures, I had a compulsion to combine reassuring traces of culture, of home, with these wild landscapes. This was a way for me to rationalize my relationship with the Arctic, to view it in human terms. Comforting signs of domesticity, of life in more hospitable climes were overlaid on the frozen landscape. I favored laces, fabrics, and patterns featuring flora and fauna from further south, especially elements that brought to mind the golden age of exploration. The hybrid landscapes combine interior and exterior, exotic and familiar as a framework for considering the Arctic in human terms.