Zoe Maxwell
Zoe is a painter completing her final year of a Fine Art BA at Leeds Arts University. Her work questions the reliability of memory and photography, extending the scene captured by the camera whilst introducing new traces of narratives and inaccuracies. Zoe was first introduced to the fallibility of memory after a family member suffered a brain tumour, damaging their ability to recall memories with the same accuracy. Zoe is interested in false recollection, constructing a confabulation on canvas. She has developed a process from photograph to painting that recontextualises the image, mimicking the process memory undergoes during retrieval. Much like memory, her paintings shift clarity, sitting between the real and imagined navigating a past and present plain.
Zoe Maxwell
Zoe is a painter completing her final year of a Fine Art BA at Leeds Arts University. Her work questions the reliability of memory and photography, extending the scene captured by the camera whilst introducing new traces of narratives and inaccuracies. Zoe was first introduced to the fallibility of memory after a family member suffered a brain tumour, damaging their ability to recall memories with the same accuracy. Zoe is interested in false recollection, constructing a confabulation on canvas. She has developed a process from photograph to painting that recontextualises the image, mimicking the process memory undergoes during retrieval. Much like memory, her paintings shift clarity, sitting between the real and imagined navigating a past and present plain.
Skirting Board Lake
Oil On Canvas
100cm x 90cm
The painting, Skirting Board Lake, combines multiple scenes to encourage the viewer to question perception and accuracy of recollection. This process compresses time and place to create a confabulated scene, a false recollection. A place where trees are either floating, hovering slightly or just swaying inthe wind.
Within the landscape of the painting, internal and external features are merged. The title of the work brings attention to the skirting board, wrapping around the perimeter of the body of water. But the ducks are stood, or sat, not floating. There are reflections and then there aren’t. The surface seems to be water,yet also contradicts the typical qualities. All these subtle contradictions create a dreamlike and disorientating setting, challenging typical perceptions
