2020 Grad Show

Zoë Wallace

Painting

I am a multimedia artist that works through personal experiences while connecting them to wider social concepts and subcultures. I create with paint, ceramics, and fibre, to make paintings and sculptures. From a small town in Saskatchewan, I left a peaceful forest realm parallel to a city that is in a constant state of turmoil and headed to Calgary to receive my Bachelor of Fine Arts from Alberta University of the Arts. I am graduating with a major in painting and a minor in ceramics. I have had time to realize so much throughout my education; it could be the distance, the discovered aftereffects of impactful moments, or just a newly developed nostalgia, but I can’t help but find great inspiration from my memories.

The artwork’s core ideas are of memory, but it also explores concepts of emergence from the past and sovereignty in the present with the use of storytelling, bold imagery and material as a carrier of meaning. Lately I have been working exclusively with raw wood panels (mostly Birch), natural pigments, fire, photo transfer and acrylic paint to promote these ideas. The memory of the wood grain speaks to me and will bring waves of the past to mind, with the use of fire, I follow along the grain to pull the shapes to the forefront. I use natural pigments across the wood. Those choices explain the realness and rawness of an individual’s memory. I then employ acrylic and photo transfer to highlight a story, I apply the transfer and continue to burn and melt. I then use acrylic for outlines that slightly resemble connections between neurons in the brain. The plastic and unnatural quality of those materials represent how your memories and brain can lie to you, it can glamorize or degrade what happened. Including the way each person can experience an evocation. The work reclaims and reframes events through the filter of remembering. It acts as an ode to self-discovery and what lies within (the unseen). It represents the inner, truth, and nature vs. nurture that is embedded into identity.