JUST A GLOBULAR GUY

We met Zimra for breakfast at On Orange in Lancaster. The busy cafe was four doors down from the space we’d be installing in later that day. While poking around the menu, we all poured cream into our coffee. This was a mistake for me. The coffee was good. The food was fantastic.

 

He was kind enough to lend us a piece for Homebodies Lancaster. Fighting the constant drizzle, and bustling downtown streets, he pulled his crated sculpture from the back seat of his green sedan. The piece looked like the greatest peak of a cornstarch and speaker experiment; a bouquet of viscous branches laying into each other. Later, we’d come to learn that Zimra wants his objects to function as Scholars’ Rocks.

 

He mentioned the exhibition Structure  &  Absence at White Cube Gallery. Curator Craig Burnett describes Scholars’ Rocks as opportunities for a person to improvise and allow “the forms and [their] knowledge to combine.” Zimra describes clay as a material whose internal logic is of formlessness. He is looking for it to “reveal itself as it is.” Catching himself, he asked, “Where’s the starting point? The material and the body...maybe that’s not meaningful enough.”

 

The day after exhibition, we helped Zimra set up the ceramics studio for his summer courses at Millersville University. “I just would not be a very good tech,” Zimra said later. He talked about the arrangement of the studio space as a contributor to the work made. Knowing the working practice of his students, he set up individual stations for each student; wheels for potters, larger tables for the those hand-building. We struggled to find a place suitable for the two big electric/kick-wheel hybrids.

Zimra recently accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD). He worries about not having access to the ceramics community he's built for himself here. He will be packing soon and making the big move over the northern border this summer. The Trump jokes can only get better from here until he leaves the states.