Artist | Educator | Curator | Storyteller
STUDIO ECOLOGIST
Studio Ecology is the Art of Living Studio Study.
This project is about how artists compose their studio spaces, and what special elements come together to create the conditions for the emergence of a palpable, creative spirit. I choose to enter art space as if everything is alive - tools, processes, collaborators, and the space itself. I create as if the entire imaginative landscape is made up beings with history and a point of view. How might a living studio serve as teacher? What might a living studio teach us about seasonal cycles and states of change? Might a well tended-to creative space hold our collaborative consciousness? What happens to art ideas if they are tended to like a healthy garden, or forest? How does the creative act germinate, root, sprout, bud, leaf, flower, bloom, cross pollinate, fruit, seed, wilt and fertilize in a living studio? What could it feel like to live as a living studio artist-philosopher?
About
Jeff Zimpel is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and storyteller whose lifelong dialogue with the forests of Northern Wisconsin formed the ecological worldview that now grounds his scholarship and creative practice. Growing up in continual conversation with the other-than-human world, he learned to see environments as living systems and collaborators.
Across classrooms and cultural spaces, Jeff cultivates a practice based in the idea that vital learning environments behave like ecosystems: materials circulate, processes remain visible, ideas emerge, and participants shape the space as much as the space shapes them.
Jeff’s Living Studio approach is born of a belief that learning environments can be composed and tended like living systems. As an Artist in Residence Curator with Arts@Large and as a scholar within UW-Stevens Point’s Ed.D. in Educational Sustainability program, he continues to explore how ecological thinking transforms teaching, learning, and creative participation. In his doctoral studies he seeks to advance educational change by tending to living studios that honor entangled agency and to practice in dialogue with the vibrant life of materials.
jzimpelapah@gmail.com
instagram
CURATOR
Background image from 2024, during the A@L Creative Spirits cocktail hour. Photo by LILY Shea
