Zola Simone is an interdisciplinary artist from Atlanta, GA, where they discovered a love for the arts, outdoors, and community in the "city in a forest". Zola's love for the arts began at the age of 4 as her Mema passed down lessons of sewing and jewelry making in Atlanta's West End.

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Working across sculpture, drawing, and video, their practice is built around material and medium exploration and consideration. Found objects like cardboard, bark, and soil, alongside textiles, scents, and textures, guide the work. Through acts of deconstruction—tearing, digging, and unfolding—and reconstruction—weaving, tying, growing, and binding—Zola crafts forms that welcome viewers into spaces both familiar and unknown.

 

Memory is at the heart of my process, rooted in a deep respect for the Southern landscape and its Black and Indigenous caretakers. As a Black Southern artist, I engage with the cyclical rhythms of release, return, and repair that accompany the grief of generational displacement. My works serve as vessels for exploring relationships to land as acts of rehoming. Maroon societies and non-native species carry essential wisdom, embodying possibilities for restoration.

 

Together ador(e)nment, stewardship, and care are imagined as forms of armor. Each piece is an invitation to dream—a place to encounter the past within the present. These works become a living archive of memory, calling on the viewer to become its protector. How do you shield a memory? As matrilineal wisdom, craft, and oral traditions teach us: to protect a memory, you may place it in another’s hands. My creations are offerings of shared spaces for reflection and wonder, asking viewers to engage, hold, and honor the memories they encounter, letting them lead the way to a future of our dreams.

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"I want the work to take me home, while knowing that it can't"

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