Knotty Enigmas

2026 Exhibition launch special event: Feb 5 from 6-8 pm (program at 6:30 pm)
In-person tours: Feb 27 at noon and Mar 12 at 6:30 pm
Virtual tour: Mar 25 at noon on Facebook Live  

“It started with a feeling, a knot in the pit of my stomach, a certain tightness. The mother knot, the knot of all knots, a mass with many, many lines coming from it, knotted themselves, intertwined with others.” (Zana Wensel, 2018) 

When trauma, grief and loss go unprocessed, they get lodged inside the body. For Zana Wensel, they felt dark, amassed, and tangled, a visceral, noisy presence that inhabited their stomach. In recognizing this presence, rather than continue to push it away, Zana extended time and curiosity to themselves. They began to sit in the discomfort with the physical sensations.  

Drawing the knots felt like drawing the dark presence out of their being and onto the page. Each drawing and sculpture allowed the presence to take its own. Patiently and deliberately, Zana added eight layers of graphite, one on top of the other, following the cords as they moved across the page until they eventually became an existence that lived outside their body.  

Zana Wensel’s Knotty Enigmas speaks to the need for our bodies and minds to be connected and cared for in their entirety with honesty, curiosity and empathy. Trauma, grief and loss are a collective human experience, loss is inevitable, and lives within us all. Caring for those wounds, allowing them to move through us, to become a part of our beings and our stories is an act of healing.  

“I used to think that the thread running through my practice was the trauma, but no – it is the soul. It is the soul pulling me forward to follow that thread.” Zana Wensel, 2025.