Mallory Zondag is an award-winning artist and artist educator living in New York. Exhibited internationally in solo and group shows, her work focuses on the natural world and how it relates to the physical body and the human experience. She explores deeply personal and connective universal stories through the meditative and hands-on practices of wet felting, weaving, sculpting, and stitching, seeking to bring the ephemeral into physical being. The growth and decay of the natural world, the duality of discomfort and attraction we feel towards it, and humanity's place within this dichotomy informs her dimensional textures and sculptural pieces.
Zondag’s work has been exhibited at The Banana Factory, Bethlehem, PA; The Allentown Art Museum, PA: The International Biennial of Textile Art Scythia, Ukraine; View Arts and Culture Center, Old Forge, NY; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Towson University, MD; Ceres Gallery, NYC, NY; Main Street Studio, Ballston Lake, NY; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; El Museo Del Barrio, NYC, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY: Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA; and Moravian University, Bethlehem, PA. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Acadia National Park, The Allentown Art Museum, and The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY.
Zondag shares her passion for handmade one-of-a-kind textiles through various educational programs and residencies. Many of these programs involve a collaborative element where the entire school works together on a single project. These programs bring an exciting hands-on artistic experience to the students as well as emphasizing community and collaboration through art. As a resident artist in over twenty schools and community organizations she has led her Fiber Living Wall program where hand felted wool living walls are collaboratively created with students of all ages and abilities. The final sculpture finds a permanent home within the school or community space. She has been the recipient of three NY Statewide Capital Regrants for Independent Artists and Community Arts and a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition for Creative Excellence and Support in Pennsylvania. Her work is held in private collections, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Acadia National Park and The Allentown Art Museum. She studied Fashion Design at Pratt Institute (BFA 2016).
Artist Statement
My artwork is an investigation into humanity’s tenuous relationship with the natural world. Through my sculpture I am seeking to dissolve the perceived boundaries between our bodies, our planet, and the ephemeral nature of what makes us human. I use traditional fiber art techniques and soft sculpture as a medium to tell these stories in order to create dissonance, to push the observer into the space between their assumptions of the world and an often uncomfortable reality. I see the history of textile art as a form of environmental mimicry, a way that we as humans attempt to replicate nature to protect ourselves and adorn ourselves, to create second skins and comfortable environments through which our stories could be told. It is through this lens that I build pieces that represent our inexorable connection to the earth. I blur together motifs of the visceral body and the natural world to reflect personal and universal narratives, stitching together internal experiences with the external world to reflect the interconnected nature of life.
