Dudley Zopp

Born in Lexington, Kentucky, Dudley Zopp graduated With High Distinction in Modern Foreign Languages from the University of Kentucky and went on to earn an M.A. in French. She later completed five years of Post-Graduate studies at the Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville. She lives in Lincolnville, Maine.

Zopp finds inspiration in geological processes and cultural histories of place. Her engagement with restoring habitat where she lives, and her passion for learning new languages, feed directly into her work, which ranges from site specific installations to paintings, woodcuts, and limited edition books. She has completed residencies at geologically significant sites in Newfoundland, Spain and Italy, and worked independently in Kentucky, Maine, South Carolina, and New Mexico.

She has exhibited widely at galleries, universities and museums in New England and the Midwest. Her work is housed in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art, Bates College Museum of Art, and Yale University, as well at as other university and museum collections nationally. A solo exhibition, Landscapes, Vessels and Jars, occasioned conversations about cities, continents, places and objects [Moremen Gallery, Louisville, 2019]. She is currently working on a series of artist’s books focused on the theme of ekphrasis.

Statement:

I’m a hybrid - a dedicated painter and writer, as well as an amateur naturalist and student of languages. I believe that in the long run, taking care of the earth through habitat restoration is more important than any painting or book I will ever make. Painting is a private matter, done by me to understand what I’m seeing.

Habitat on the other hand is enjoyed by many. Humans are only one of the multitude of life forms with whom I share my world from season to season, where Nature is the greatest teacher. The tension between the indifference of the earth’s tectonic movements and the fragility of human existence, the tenuousness of all life forms, seems to me a logical place to begin making art.

Painting, like scrying and divining, is an act through which an artist channels information and turns it back into human experience. As with icons and totems, the spirit of the landscape resides in the painting. As subject matter, patterns formed by stones and sediments interest me because they are evidence of geological processes from the macro (orogenies) to the micro (the breakdown of rock into sand particles). With water as a solvent to shift and erode the pigments, the resulting image is as much a product of the water’s flow as it is of my imagination.

As the expression of my involvement with environmental projects, my paintings and drawings are about time and where we humans fit into this present moment, knowing that our lives are bounded by a past measured in thousands of millions of years of geological events, and by a future measured in the slow growth of organic life, an unknowable future of which we are the accidental stewards.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS