Zipporah Camille Thompson

Georgia Fellow for Visual Arts

ARTIST STATEMENT

Approaching folk craft traditions with an improvisational, imaginative wild and speculative futuristic approach, the work explores the body, otherness, and identity via hybrid landscapes. Composite landscapes combine highly tactile disparate materials such as wild woven textiles, hand knotted nets, fired clay, felted wool, paper pulp, handspun cord, and found objects. Tension and force unite discordant ephemera into handwoven cloth representing intimate processes of alchemy and metamorphosis.

Sculpted shapeshifters are prevalent in the work: they symbolize empowered bodies in crisis – namely Black, Brown, women, and queer bodies; united in communion with their elemental counterparts: water bodies, atmospheric cloud bodies, bodies of earth and fire. These shapeshifters fuse hard and soft earth tones with otherworldly fluorescents, cotton and plastic, tension and laxity to further signify the intersectionality of these bodies. Mythological references overlaid with sublime/ethereal color derived from both Hudson River School landscape paintings and Haint Blue of the Carolinas channel spiritual chakra energy and protection magic.

ARTIST BIO

Zipporah Camille Thompson, an Atlanta-based weaver and sculptor, explores alchemical transformations through clay and textiles. Her work examines chaos, metamorphosis, and triumph are examined through ancestral narratives patchworked with black/brown liberatory and imagined geographies. Her pieces, materialize as altars, shapeshifters, and hybrid landscapes, explores hope, myth, magic, and reconstructed power through limitless spirituality.

Zipporah Camille Thompson holds an MFA from the University of Georgia and a BFA from UNC Charlotte. Her work has been featured nationally and internationally. She is a 2024 Skowhegan participant, 2024 South Arts Georgia Fellow for Visual Arts, a 2023 recipient of the Margie E. West Prize, a 2021 MOCA GA Working Artist Project Fellow, a 2020 Artadia Atlanta Awardee, a Watershed Zenobia Scholarship Award grantee, an NCECA Multicultural Fellow, and an Idea Capital Travel Grant recipient. Thompson is represented by Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta and is passionate about history, roller-skating, unicorns, zombies, the moon, tarot, and fantasy.