Zoe Steele

About the Artist​

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Zoe’s practice surrounds themes of nostalgia, familiarity, comfort, childhood recollection and preserving/ recalling forgotten history. She is interested in the falsification of memory, the credibility of your childhood thoughts, and the idea that everything is fiction, both painting and photography, nothing is real and everything can be fabricated. Her work is primarily oil paintings; using glazing as a way of replicating the effects produced from classical dark room processes, giving a subtle nod back to the source of her work which is photography.

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Her most recent body of work titled ‘Chernobyl’ explores the notion of repressed memories through an exploration into the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The work aims to navigate the representation of a ‘physical memory’ through paintings that are suggestive yet not overly invasive, exploring themes of suppressed trauma and preservation while questioning how visibility affects how we perceive ruin.'

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