Tactile Studios is tucked amongst a park of Garden City storage units. This single storage unit serves a conglomeration of artists, the largest space belonging to Ace Zappa. The name of the studio is apt considering Ace’s background in sewing. She has recently reconnected with her long-standing interest in fiber-based work, experimenting with small patchwork quilting and larger crochet sculptures—two of which were part of recent exhibitions at the Idaho Botanical Garden. Currently she’s exploring ways to combine her love of fiber with her painting.
Ace gathers and accepts donations of materials to rescue them from landing in the waste stream. She’s at the point now, though, that she has to turn down many donations because of studio capacity. In her pursuit of space within her art, she has scaled her paintings larger and larger. The subject matter of her paintings is a blend of the temporal qualities of both nature and time spent with friends. She creates an abstracted version from her memories of those moments, resulting in a mysterious ghostly rendering of figures and nature scenes in house paint. She prefers creating suggestions rather than clearly defined colors and shapes. She allows the paint to drip and run after applying it, letting the material do what it likes. The gestural marks are loose compared to the small stitches she perfected in her previous life as a professional quilter. It parallels the shifting between micro and macro one can see in her paintings.
Her studio contains a salon-style display of multitudes of painted works on boards, while larger paintings remain standing against the walls. Collections of materials, elements from nature, and artistic knick-knacks serving as inspiration line her shelves and upper platform reachable by a narrow set of stairs. On the upper level, we pass a table filled with animal archeology—bones, skulls, spinal parts—some atop painting studies, and others filled with leaves and flowers. Motivational notes and affirmations are posted on the walls and lying between some of her paintings. One can imagine her passing along such snippets of wisdom to visitors, as she expresses interest in captivating and influencing future generations of creative thinkers.
If you are interested in seeing more of Ace Zappa’s art, visit her at Surel’s Place in December, where she’ll be completing a book project based on her art and daily journaling.