Gestate: Q&A with Heidi Zenisek

Heidi Zenisek is a sculptor from Iowa City, IA where she received her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Iowa and spent her younger years on a farm surrounded by dirt, cows, corn and rust. Since then, she has lived and exhibited throughout Iceland, participated in numerous residencies, worked at sculpture parks and galleries, and was most recently awarded the Dean’s Fellowship to begin graduate school at the University of Maryland.

Gestate was on view at Hillyer on April 5 – 28, 2019.

 
Much of your work centers around the parallels between society’s abuse of ecology with man’s mistreatment of women—how did you first draw these kinds of parallels and how has that impacted the art you create?

It was a thing my subconscious brain knew before my conscious brain. I’ve always used farming practices and materials as a language and lens to look at facets of society and our interaction with nature. Last year, I began making some smaller objects and working more intuitively with reproductive imagery from plants and animals when suddenly my own body was beginning to surface in the forms. I was quite curious about this new thing happening and was finally able to unpack it after months of reflection and continued work under the umbrella of feminism & environmentalism. I fully connected the dots when I began writing these texts about an allegorical war between a personified Mother Nature and society with natural disasters sent in to fight battles against her aggressors. I was using the term “man” in relation to human kind and while writing about “man” battling this woman Mother Earth I just realized I was creating feminist epics.

You utilize a wide variety of materials and processes in your work, from agricultural refuse to 3D printing techniques. Can you share your thought process behind the types of materials you gravitate to with different projects?

I love experimenting with materials! Sometimes it’s an instinctual attraction, other times I use what’s available to me where I’m making. I like contrasting. Refined vs. raw. Organic vs. inorganic. Rudimentary vs. technologic. I think about the aesthetic and conceptual qualities and how that relates to the ideas of the piece I’m working on, but also how it could be redefined. For example, in Gestate I used 3D printing process for the cobs and used PLA filament, which is a corn product. I used this technologic process to create a standardized product, much like that manipulation happening in agriculture. It’s about optimizing yields.

Can you describe the audience response to Gestate? Does engagement with viewers impact your creative process, and how?

Women were most impacted by it: the tired stalks became battered bodies subtly rotating, mirrored by their own ghostly reflections. This sparked some great conversations surrounding feminism and ecofeminism. There was also a lot of intrigue about the materials: the black reflection pool, the spectrum of the lights, and especially the stalks/cobs. We joke at University of Maryland and call it “farm to pedestal” and people without a rural background are quite curious about it. It’s very fun to chat about. I’m constantly thinking about “the viewer” so engagement with them is vital to my process.

You’ve lived in a lot of different places—Iowa, Iceland, and now in the DMV. Have the places you’ve resided in inspired your pieces? If so, how and which ones?

Definitely. With every new place comes a shift in my making. The people around me, materials available, landscapes. It goes through the blender of my brain and comes out in my work. Once I’m immersed in the day-to-day flow of a place it allows me to unravel the reality of the locale a bit. The process is not about investigation, but about observation and allowing facets of the place to creep into my psyche. My perspective as a foreigner, but not a tourist, shines a light on unique, sometimes unflattering, qualities unnoticed or ignored by locals. The observations are used as a conceptual foundation for site-specific work. Artist as witness.

In Iowa I was dealing with materials and concepts from agriculture, which you can see in the installation Yield on my website, heidizenisek.com. In Iceland I made work about the fishing industry and its impact on the ecosystem of the fjord, but also the economics of the town (Main Vein, Fish Brain). After Iceland I became very enamored and amazed by the natural world, which lead to work about the human hand on the environment. I traded the mountains and sea of Iceland for endless fields of crop in Illinois, so at this point and was surrounded by huge farming operations. Agriculture on a scale I had never seen before. There was just this mass production of produce and I began to think a lot about the augmentation of reproductive cycles to increase commodity. I created Cornhub & Requiem for the Midwestern Moon when my Illinois observations mixed with DC ideas of these grand memorials, and monuments. Currently, concepts from each place are mixing and the work is perhaps getting a bit political. My materials are becoming more artificial and process more technologic, probably due to living in a city. Place is the most influential part of my practice. I’m just learning about the world and trying to make sense of it.

Recently you were awarded the Dean’s Fellowship for graduate school at University of Maryland. Do you have plans for future exhibitions or projects as you begin the fellowship?

I have a bunch of ambitious works on the roster, but I either need to get crafty with my materials or find funding because my brain seems to always be more ambitious than my bank account. Hopefully more collaboration is on the horizon as well. I’ve recently been working with water resources engineer on some site-specific pieces, so artists and non-artists: reach out if you’d like to play!