Mallory Zondag

"Watch Your Step," wool, upcycled fibers, recycled wool, cotton, thread, wire, soy wax, beeswax, latex paint, tissue, beads

Photos courtesy of Mallory Zondag. Used with permission.

When I arrived in Acadia and began exploring, I was enamored by the incredibly lush and varied growth covering every bit of rock and earth. From the clouds and sprays of Reindeer Lichen that seemed to echo the sea foam crashing on the coast to the plush carpets of Haircap and Broom Forkmoss and even the flat, almost invisible shingled rock shield and cinder lichens that create new patterns in the granite through their density.

These lichens eat rock, creating sand in which moss can find its footing, the moss becomes a nursery for seedlings from blueberry bushes to pine trees. They are the beginning of the forest every Acadia visitor, including myself, falls in love with. What I noticed even more as I began to hike the trails was how the growth stopped at the trail edges, how you could see the paths people traveled most, both on and off the paths, by looking for the absence of layered lichens and mosses on the granite.

"Watch Your Step" is an ode to the forest builders, the soil creators, the tiny organisms underfoot who grow ecosystems from the ground up. It is a call to watch your step and stay on paths, they're there to allow us to enjoy the incredibly diverse and abundant ecosystem and to protect it.

– Mallory Zondag, 2023

Mallory Zondag is a mixed media fiber artist and artist educator. She graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA in Fashion Design and her work has been exhibited in both solo and group shows in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Ukraine. She has been an artist in residence at The Allentown Art Museum, The Wassaic Project and many schools and community organizations. During many of these residencies she has led community art programs where felted wool living walls are collaboratively created with students of all ages and abilities. She was commissioned to create the sensory space for Artsquest's Accessible Arts program and was recently commissioned to recreate a component of one of Amalia Mesa-Bains's installations for her retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum. Mallory currently travels around the Northeast teaching workshops, leading community art programs and installing shows.

Her work explores our tenuous relationship with the continuous growth and decay of the natural world and humanity’s place within those cycles using felted wool, wax, fibers, fabrics and objects both found and recycled. Our collective fascination and repulsion towards natural processes, from blooming flowers to blooming molds, pushes her to sculpt moments of grotesque beauty, investigating this duality through the meditative and hands-on practices of wet felting, weaving, sculpting and stitching.

Visit her website.

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