IN THE STUDIO: Malcolm Zachariah By Mandy Messina
Malcolm Zachariah doing an ArtMoves demo. Photo credit Carly Davis of Arts Council Oklahoma City
How would you describe yourself professionally?
I would say, I’m an artist and scientist. I feel like I’m focused in broad areas—all the arts, all the sciences. When did you start becoming involved in the OKC arts community?
I burnt out on the PhD track and came back to OKC in 2014. I just made art for a whole year until I got my job (at the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality) in 2015. How did you become so involved in such a short period of time?
It’s mainly showing up! I just started to attend events, because I wasn’t aware of much outside of the Paseo District, and the OKC Festival of the Arts. I didn’t know that there was such a vibrant community! Also, Downtown has changed a lot from when I was growing up to what it is now. Which came first for you, science or art?
My mom was just talking about how I always started with art first. At my kindergarten graduation, (where we dressed up as our future careers), I was a painter.
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Malcolm Zachariah, La Convivencia, 18 in x 24 in watercolor on cold-pressed Arches paper, 2019)
I started in first grade with these kirigami sculptures: I was cutting and folding paper birds, from my Birds of the World book. I liked dinosaurs—Jurassic Park had just come out that year—maybe that was the trigger? Could you expand a bit on this integration of art and science?
In both art and science, you learn by experimentation and being rigorous. My sketchbooks are basically a continuation of my lab notebooks. Science teaches you to be observant and very methodical, and I’ve integrated that into my art practice. For instance, I started keeping marine coral reef aquariums in middle school, and even I went to grad school to study marine drug discovery. That’s how I learn best—by making connections to other things that I understand. Marine biology is definitely the inspiration for the watercolours. Fish sometimes use colour as a warning, ironically, that also gets them caught, because home aquariums
are often installed with black lights to make the fluorescent colours more vibrant. Also, as someone who’s interested in materials, I feel like being a biochemist in particular, gives you x-ray vision mostly in identifying materials. This thing is made out of fiber, plastic, etc.; those are all molecules and atoms. Have you had any new developments in one of the mediums you work in?
I had an Art Group (ARTGRP) studio visit where the group asked if I’d considered adding colour to my kirigami. I told them that it’s very difficult to colour those after you form them, because the paper can get wrinkly. Learning about paper at Artspace at Untitled really helped. Collaborating with Emma Difani (printmaker and fellow ARTGRP member) has been great because we each know our practices well and we don’t have to tell one another what to do. We each do our parts and combine them together. When we made a life-size yucca plant last year, we were just thinking about
