Kristine Zingeler’s artistic practice emerges from a process of slow and attentive looking, curiosity, and wonder. She is drawn to the beauty and resonance of nature’s detritus: rocks, seashells, feathers, tree bark, seed pods. Her studio is filled with an ever-expanding collection of objects and fragments, often gathered from her garden, or nearby walks with her family. She approaches these objects with the empathy and curiosity of a maker, parsing the complexities of their colour, form, and texture in a bid to understand their creation.

In the Balance, Zingeler’s new site-specific installation, offers a series of ceramic vessels inspired by the overlooked beauty and labyrinthine complexity of wasp nests. While wasps (of which there are over 100,000 known species, and potentially millions unknown) tend to be popularly maligned as vengeful pests, their predilection for both predation and pollination make them crucial to the balance of an ecosystem. Wasps are also inveterate makers. Certain varieties of wasp mix tree bark or other plant matter with their saliva to make a fine, paper-like substance which forms the hexagonal architecture of their nests. For Zingeler, these paper wasp nests are a source of endless fascination, pointing to the wasps’ material ingenuity and highly complex social structure, and to seasonal cycles of renewal, growth, and dormancy.

Zingeler begins each ceramic work with hand-coiling; winding and looping ropes of clay into forms that echo classical Greek pottery. She then turns her attention to the vessel’s surface, adding or subtracting textural details to create patterns or subtle gradations in a process that is both responsive and improvisational. The physicality and unpredictability of clay is crucial to Zingeler’s process: it becomes yet another conduit for wonder and curiosity. This unerring attention to the subtle and the unnoticed is at the heart of Zingeler’s practice. We, in turn, are encouraged to slow down and attune ourselves to the seductive, the enigmatic, and the weird hidden in the detritus of our own lives.