Zola Rollins

Zola Rollins

Chicago City Park Food Forest Network

Chicago’s network of parks and green spaces were originally conceived in the Victorian era tradition of highly manicured parks to function as an escape from the city, representing a European ideal of nature. Their design and plantings have remained largely unchanged since the beginning of the 20th century but the city has changed rapidly around them. Currently these green spaces support a large amount of life in comparison to the urban areas of the city. Many people live, camp, and rest in the parks as they are one of the only truly public spaces that are generally open year-round and overnight. They offer a small amount of habitat for migrating and city dwelling animals. But city parks have the potential to be spaces for people, animals, and plants to feel relief from the city and be truly allowed to exist, rest, breathe, and seek sustenance. I see an opportunity to allow these spaces to be more supportive and abundant than they ever were while also allowing people that live in them and nearby some autonomy over the space they inhabit. This opportunity is a network of self-sustaining community managed food forests. An extension of the project would be the construction of small structures that would include composting toilets, handwashing sinks and a lending library style seed bank to support the diversity of plantings and agency over the landscape. The diversity of planting would aim to coexist with current flora, create an interconnected ecology, as well as provide food for the longest period of time throughout the year by choosing plants that have staggered harvest times. For the parks that serve as sports fields the plantings would be focused on the outer edge where trees are commonly already in place. The larger parks could support more integrated forests in open areas. A more detailed plan would be created through collaboration with any combination of willing participants involved in the specific community the park shares space with.

Artist Statement

Through reproduction I explore my relationship with nature and representations of it. My focus is on objects that were designed to imitate nature, e.g. natural history museum displays, landscaping rocks, hollow faux rocks, outdoor “rock” speakers, cell towers disguised as trees, and faux plants. Sculptural works reproduce, camouflage, celebrate, and undermine these objects in an exploration of falsity, credibility, and trust between the objects and their viewers. I seek to inspect our obsession with recreating a Nature that exists only in our minds, as separate from us and perpetually out of reach. This allows me to explore a host of essentialized sociological obsessions and binaries and experiment with novel modes of queer art production and aesthetics. While also attempting to understand our fraught relationship to Nature and the consequences of the ways in which we conceive of it. I use found objects, repurposed material and traditional sculptural materials such as concrete, plaster, and wood. I practice intuitive construction techniques in an effort to leave time for discoveries and conversation with my materials and to keep making enjoyable. I am inspired by all reproductions, and the fetishization of nature represented in models, miniatures, and imposters. In my recent work Kshh! Kshh! Kshh! I worked out of a specific sense memory of a metal rake scraping a concrete sidewalk producing a chilling sensation running down my spine. The piece is a slab of concrete mimcing a sidewalk with chunks of broken sidewalk being raked up, narratively turning these bits of lost infrastructure into leaves or lawn debris. I’m testing the limits of transformation and reproduction, shifting scale and implying objects could be something other than they seem or have power beyond their expected function. A light hearted but deeply meaningful attempt to understand how mimicry and reproduction affects the expectations we have for an object. I feel these reproductions elicit a naive and earnest eagerness for understanding that opens a gentle space for ambiguous recognition and generous reading. I want to allow people to interface with the objects in their lives in new ways, and be more lenient with the things, people, plants and animals in their circle of influence.

Artist Bio

Zola Rollins, born in Los Angeles, California, is an interdisciplinary sculpture artist with a focus on objects that were designed to imitate nature, e.g. natural history museum displays, landscaping rocks, hollow faux rocks, outdoor “rock” speakers, cell towers disguised as trees, and faux plants. Sculptural works reproduce, camouflage, celebrate, and undermine these objects in an exploration of falsity, credibility, and trust between the objects and their viewers. Their practice is inspired by their background in regenerative landscaping and their desire to seek out human ways of being in metropolitan cities and alternative modes of queer art production and aesthetics. They are currently seeking a degree at The School of The Art Institute Chicago.

zolarollins.com