Bibelot – a collection of textile works by artist Zola Kell / First Friday at Bernice’s Bakery

Zola Kell is an installation and mixed-media artist currently interested in creating playful objects. Working with primarily salvaged materials, she explores how to use textiles to give life to sculptural forms. Along with a variety of traditional media, she often blends digital technology and alternative photography to produce the imagery and textures she wants for installation pieces. Her pieces range from reveries on mythic figures that were imprinted on her in childhood and investigations into the magic of the natural world.

Currently, she is exploring themes of nostalgia, family, and identity through reimagined toys and playthings. No longer satisfied with drawing windows into which viewers can look, Zola seeks to build worlds for you to inhabit– each a microcosm that reflects her interior reality.

In “bibelot,” Zola plays with imagery from childhoods that span more than her fair share of generational experience – drawing on toys and figures that would have been at home as children’s playthings at the turn of the century or in the 1930’s.

She is less fascinated with these objects as harking back to a ‘simpler time’ and more curious about how certain icons continue to return again and again as imagery of childhood wonderment: the horse, the moon, the swan, and the house. What is it about these characters that continues to hold our attention?

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