DONNA ZEKAS

ARTIST BIO

Toronto-based artist Donna Zekas maintains a full-time studio practice encompassing sculpture and painting. She began by immersing herself in sculptural workshops and, while earning her diploma from the Toronto School of Art, expanded her focus to include a wide range of painting mediums. Zekas has continued her studies with professional artists throughout North America and abroad.

Working across disciplines, Zekas engages in an evolving process rooted in experimentation and material inquiry. Her practice incorporates multi-layered applications of paint, graphite, acid washes, cold wax, and sculptural fragments, resulting in a diverse body of work that blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Regardless of medium, her approach remains consistent: process leads, and through sustained layering, revision, and disruption, an idea gradually reveals itself.

Her work reflects an ongoing investigation into impermanence, resilience, and the quiet tensions that exist between presence and absence, structure and erosion.


ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice is grounded in an instinctual, process-driven approach to both sculpture and painting, where exploration and discovery guide the work rather than predetermined outcomes. Through continuous layering and revision—adding and subtracting materials such as Winterstone, sculptural fragments, found objects, paint, graphite, colour, and line—I allow each work to evolve through a series of intuitive choices. Deciding what to release and what to retain becomes central to making something new.

This cycle of building up and breaking down forms the conceptual framework of my work, reflecting ideas of impermanence, resilience, and transformation. Sculpture and painting operate as interconnected languages, each informing the other through material, surface, and gesture. My Winterstone sculptures embody a tension between strength and fragility, while my paintings echo this sensibility through layered surfaces and traces of erasure.

Process, experience, and material remain interdependent, shaping work that merges past and present and locates meaning within the act of making itself.

*Winterstone, my preferred sculptural material, Invented by Lorne Winters, it is a cementitious, stone-like medium activated by water, possessing both strength and weather resistance. Its inherent durability, combined with its responsiveness to process, mirrors the tensions present in my work—between fragility and permanence, control and surrender—anchoring the exploration of past and present firmly within the act of making.