Zoe Nicole Nielsen is a contemporary painter, printmaker, and speculative taxidermist. She currently attends Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana as a Master of Fine Arts candidate of studio arts, Instructor of Record, and Printmaking Studio Technician. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio arts from Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska. Zoe is active on Instagram as @zo.nicolestudio.art and has a website that can be viewed at www.zonicole.art
Show Title: The Survival Of The Not-So-Fittest
Show Description
As a chronically ill person, Zoe Nicole Nielsen’s body is too weak and vulnerable to sustain itself without continuous and extensive support from human medicine. Her survival is an unnatural defiance of the survival of the fittest; in other words, she is a human-animal that was meant to die young. Due to this, she feels a profound kinship with any non-human animal whose life has ended too soon, particularly young animals and those with limitations, deformities, or ailments that put them at risk or could lead to fatality. Some of the animals she works with have died as a result of human presence in their natural environments (roadkill). However, none of the animals she works with have lost their lives for the express purpose of taxidermy or art. Most of the animals she works with died natural deaths at a very young age due to stillbirth, failure to thrive, sickness, rejection by their mother, or some other form of natural selection. Like Nielsen’s, their bodies were not strong enough to sustain life on their own. Her work also shares the intimacy and respect ingrained in the newer movement of sustainable taxidermy in contrast to other historically crueler practices of taxidermy. In depicting varying stages of the taxidermic process, she shares how she extends care and her grief experienced while working. This show contains representations of death, health, mortality, animal anatomy, grief, and peril.
