Ellen Ziegler is a Seattle-based artist, long-standing member of artist-run SOIL gallery, and represented by Cullom Gallery. Her work investigates the psychological and physical properties of materials through drawing, assemblage and multimedia. Ziegler has been awarded an Artist Trust Fellowship in Design, Gap Grants from Artist Trust, a Foundation for Contemporary Art (NY) Travel Grant, and Individual Artists Grants from 4Culture in King County, as well as a Rome Fellowship from the Northwest Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in Italy. She is also an award-winning maker of artist’s books, which are in collections nationwide. Her books are represented by the venerable Vamp and Tramp Booksellers.

An accomplished and innovative artist, we love watching as her work shifts, always feeling new and fresh, yet recognizable as her particular vision and aesthetic. Travel clearly plays a role in Ellen’s practice and work and so when we heard she would be spending a self-directed residency in Mexico City for the month of April, we invited her to share her thoughts and inspiration with us as the first participant in our new series, EXPORTED. Here is her first entry:

Luminosity | La Luminosidad
Entry #1, San Miguel de Allende and Mexico City, Mexico – April 2015

I was raised in Southern California. Whenever I go south again, the change in the angle of the light transfixes me, like a foreign country, like a song I haven’t heard in a long time. When the weather is hot and the sun is bright, darkness is not a lack of light but another, radiating, entity.