Degree: BA Fine Art
University: Leeds Arts University
Graduation Year: 2024
Zoe Maxwell's work explores the intricacies of memory through a constructivist lens, challenging our perceptions of truth and recollection. Inspired by personal experience with memory's fragility, Maxwell uses photographs as catalysts, subverting their presumed truthfulness through a process mirroring episodic memory's malleability.
Her oil paintings embody the act of remembering itself. Structured lines are disrupted by dragged marks, while areas of clarity neighbor sections blurred into obscurity. This approach captures the essence of recollection - fragmented, shifting, and often unreliable.
Maxwell's practice goes beyond representation, questioning the nature of truth in memory and captured images. By constructing "confabulations," she creates scenes existing between what was, could have been, and might be. This invites viewers to reflect on their own processes of remembering.
As she completes her Fine Art BA at Leeds Arts University, Maxwell emerges as a thoughtful voice in contemporary art. Her work offers a fresh perspective on the intersection of memory, perception, and artistic creation, challenging us to reconsider our relationship with the past and its representation.
My practice explores the vagaries of memory through a constructivist lens, focusing on reconfiguration of recollection rather than reproducing the past.
Photographs act as a catalyst for my work as they are intrinsically linked to memory, storing external memories. We also trust photographs to provide a true account of the past. The process I have developed mimics that of episodic memory: past experiences that are recontextualised or decontextualised from initial encoding through recall. Using drawing to introduce new traces, I create a scene that derives from the original source material, extended through the handling of paint.
Ultimately, my work aims to question the reliability of recollection, starting from doubting the truth we project onto captured images. I want to bring focus to how time and experience are marked and stored within the painted surface, constructing confabulations sitting between the possibilities of what was, what could have been, and potentially what could be.
(2024) Manchester Open, Home, Manchester
(2023) Ones to watch, Sunny Bank Mills, Leeds, Farsley