ARTIST STATEMENT

A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Aggie Zed grew up in a large family on Sullivan’s Island riding ponies and donkeys on the beach. As a child she watched her father repair television sets and played for hours with cheap plastic horses and cowboys which had no moving parts. 

She could always draw.

Living in Richmond, Virginia, after graduating from The University of South Carolina with a degree in Fine Arts, she supported her painting by designing and building ceramic chess sets. Her work in clay evolved to become a widely-collected series of human-animal hybrid figures with which she has made a living.

She divides her working life between sculpture and drawing and painting.

Her drawings and painting are informed by a lifelong celebration of the beauty and strangeness of dreams posed against the absurdity and poignancy of supposedly rational human activity. Her usual mediums are dry pastel and various inks with water on paper.

Aggie Zed’s sculpture ranges from intimately-scaled ceramic figures of people and human-animal hybrids to copper wire and ceramic horses to ceramic and mixed-metals contrivances she calls “scrap floats”. Her scrap floats are intended as entries in a parade of the future.

She currently lives with her husband in Gordonsville,Virginia where she keeps animals in her life, especially chickens, which defy anthropomorphism.