Abby Wolfzorn

May 22, 2025 | Art Residents

During their residency at Azule, Abby Wolfzorn—originally from Turkey and now based in Jackson, Tennessee—brings a quiet boldness to their work, rooted in memory, emotion, and the meditative power of repetition. A self-described art school dropout and full-time barista, Abby leans into storytelling, color, and texture with a gentle intensity, translating feeling into form through their meticulous dot paintings.

During their time at Azule, Abby embraced solitude and stillness, creating large-scale works that act as internal landscapes. Their process was patient, deliberate, and deeply personal—every dot a marker of thought, each repetition an echo of emotion. They arrived with canvases in tow, including a striking red quilt and a bullet-riddled piece from a past performance—layers of past and present stitched together through careful mark-making.

Azule offered Abby more than just time and space—it became a container for emotional excavation, a place where vulnerability was not just allowed but shared. Their work here reflects both deep interiority and profound connection, shaped by both the land and the warmth of its people.

You can follow along with Abby’s journey on Instagram: @abby.wolfzorn.artist

Watch our Full Conversation

Transcript

My name is Abby Wolfzorn, and I’m coming from Jackson, Tennessee. I grew up overseas in Turkey, and that’s really formative to a lot of my work and what I do now. And, I moved to Tennessee when I was 18, and studied painting and sculpture before dropping out, so I’m an art school dropout, and now I paint and I’m a barista, and, yeah, I love what I do.

I think most artists would say that they’re pretty emotional, so I think I grew up always feeling, like, really sensitive and having a lot of emotions, but it wasn’t until I had a high school art teacher that really, like, poured into me and, talked to me about the therapeutic benefits of art and making art. But I never thought I would study it until it kinda came to my senior year and I had to decide and I really liked painting. And so once I decided to go to school, I was like, I don’t know what else I would study. I wanna study art.

I think I pull a lot from my memories, like childhood memories, growing up somewhere, like, really vibrant and colorful and, kind of being like a sponge and just soaking up all of that. So I pull a lot from memories and color and just talking to people and storytelling. Like, I love hearing stories.

So just a lot of life. Yeah.

Can you describe what you’ve been working on while you’re here at Azule?

Yeah. I’ve been working on some mostly large-scale dot paintings.

So, like this one is a quilt that I did before I came. The rest are linen canvas. And I came with the intention of wanting to, like, meditate a lot during my work, and finding the dots as a source of, like, repetition, and meditative, and exploring color, and my own internal world. It’s been basically perfect, I think, for what I wanted. It has offered me a lot of space and solitude to, like, dig into myself and what I wanted to explore.

But I also feel really connected to, like, the people here. Me and the other resident, but also Camille and everyone here has been so nice and welcoming. And, I feel like it’s really been the perfect container for being able to express, like, deep feelings and explore those things and not feel crazy. Like you’re surrounded with like-minded people and I like that.

This red dot quilt was the first piece I started when I got here. I unloaded my truck and, like, immediately put it on the wall and started working on it. So if I lift this, you can kinda see the whole thing. So that was the first piece I started working on.

This canvas I brought from home. This one I’ve actually, I shot with a rifle. So you can see the bullet holes. Those were from a performance piece that I did earlier this year where I shot a series of paintings, so I wanted to go over those, with the dot theme. And then this one I also brought from home that I had worked on earlier. I mostly did the underpaintings and the blocks of colors, and then once I got here, did the the dots. And, like, this one, the dots probably took about six hours, without like, even after the underpainting and everything. So it takes a lot of patience to do all the little circles.