Secular Relics and Apocryphal Fossils: Q&A with Zofie King
Born in Poland and raised in Germany, Zofie King immigrated to the United States in 1998. After graduating with a psychology degree in 2002, she studied interdisciplinary craft at Towson University. For six years she worked in interior design while taking classes at MICA and the Corcoran, and devoted herself to her studio art practice in 2012. Currently, King is a sculptor working primarily with found objects, both conceptually and visually. She has had solo shows at the NVCC Margaret W. Fisher Art Gallery, DC Arts Center, Mount St. Mary’s University Gallery, and her work has been included in numerous group shows. King was part of the Sparkplug Collective from 2017-2019 and is currently a member of the Washington Sculptor’s Group.
Secular Relics and Apocryphal Fossils was on view at Hillyer on September 6 – 29, 2019.
How and why did you first become interested in cabinets of curiosity as a format for your work?
I started doing box assemblages in 2012, but the interest in cabinets of curiosity has been there throughout my life. Seeing reliquaries at the Dom in Cologne is one of my first memories, and I’ve spent endless hours at the Walters Art Museum’s Chamber of Wonders in Baltimore. I’ve always been most attracted to the work of artists such as Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson, and Ed & Nancy Kienholz, who use found objects, collage, and assemblage as their main methods of creating work. There is something appealing to a vignette of objects that evoke memories and emotions.
Why did you choose to create “fossils” out of holiday molds and why do you mix them with objects that reference religion and contemporary issues?
I like to think about how traditions originated, and how they morphed into their present state. Holidays like Easter and Christmas have evolved over centuries and are based on a mashup of sometimes conflicting customs (e.g. pagan vs. Christian), as well as cultural phenomena that are pretty recent. Yet there is a perception that they have always existed in the same way. So the fossils are tongue in cheek, a fossil being a preserved organism of a past geological time, a piece of evidence from another era. There is another definition of a fossil, which is a person that is resistant to change.
Has immigrating from Poland to Germany and then to the United States influenced your work?
Yes, in the sense that the work examines objects as evidence. There is definitely a nostalgic element to this, hanging on to certain things just because they evoke the strongest emotions. I was a toddler when my family left Poland, and I have no actual memory of it, but some of the belongings we left behind during the cold war found their way back to me via visiting relatives, and those helped establish some sort of a connection to the past. When I left Germany as a 19-year-old, I had to think of what I really wanted to bring along, since I could only take two suitcases on the plane. I’d always been a collector of curiosities (shells, fossils, little trinkets), and I brought those, along with random mementos that had a story behind them. The things you tend to be attached to are the often the ones connected to stories or events you want to be reminded of.
You primarily used found objects to create the work in your exhibition at Hillyer. Where do you find these materials and what is the process of choosing material for your sculptures?
Aside from finding things in nature, perusing antique stores, estate sales, thrift stores, and flea markets, very kind people will give me things they think I’m likely to use. Sometimes I already have a concept and know what sorts of things I might need, other times an object will appear before me and inspire a piece. I do quite a bit of research in addition to finding these materials (e.g. The Reliquary Effect by Cynthia Hahn was hugely helpful with the Hillyer exhibition), and when I use an object, or mold of an object. It’s there for a purpose and has a specific meaning.
What’s next for you? Will you continue using the cabinets of curiosity format and antique holiday molds, or are you heading in a different direction?
Cabinets of curiosity will very likely always play some part, but even in this current show I started moving away from holiday themed molds. I will definitely continue exploring the idea of molds more generally; I’ve been using resin, paper, fabric, and sculpting compound to create positives and negatives of objects. This is partly inspired by the plaster casts of the Vesuvius victims in Pompeii, which have always intrigued me, so I’m currently exploring that further.
