DAVID: Can I ask you a question?

ZOEY: Yes.

DAVID: Do you have a good memory?

ZOË: Yeah, I think I really do have a good memory.

I mean, my husband is always telling me he's really surprised at visual details in particular, that he would never remember.

So I think when it comes to remembering sensory details about things.

Yeah.

Usually I would say I have a great memory.

DAVID: Do you do you have an earliest memory?

ZOË: Memory seems to get stronger, like the older I get.

And so I find that I have earlier memories the older that I get.

And so one actually just came to me recently.

Maybe this is the earliest, I don't know, but, I have this memory of being, like, in a high chair, young, maybe like three years old, in my kitchen, in my childhood house, and my mom is cooking dinner, and she has a wooden spoon, and I can hear her, like, tapping it on the edge of the pot.

But there's like a little tray table around me at my high chair, and she had given me some clay, that kind of clay that tears off and strips these like, packages of, you know, all the rainbow colors lined up.

And she had given me some red clay, and I just I was pounding it and smashing it, too.

And every time she would tap, you know, her spoon.

I was making noise, too.

And that memory came to me recently and I thought, oh, and I asked my mom, did this, did this actually happen?

And she said, yeah, totally.

That happened.

So I think maybe that's my earliest memory.

Yeah.

DAVID: That's great.

ZOË: Yeah.

DAVID: So you already touched on this, but I've been thinking about abstraction.

ZOË: Yeah.

DAVID: Does abstraction have a certain function or purpose for you or feeling?

ZOË: Abstraction is so much about getting to the immediate core of the underlying emotion or tone, the mood of the work, really.

And I think it's an extremely powerful tool in that sense that I sometimes desire to always and only work in that format.

But, you know, in my work, I kind of almost ride the boundary between representation and abstraction all the time because I'm, I'm pulling on kind of their strengths from both of them.

So, you know, often a piece that begins with representational imagery will totally dissolve, like by the time I'm done with it, and it becomes more of an abstract image.

There are things about representational imagery, like recognizable elements of landscape, that help bolster, like I was saying, the story that's happening in the image, but it really is abstraction, particularly color, and just the raw composition of the image that I think holds the the kind of real weight of the actual piece.

So I really admire the pure abstract painters for their ability to just really, like, get to the heart of it all.

So immediately, there's such a mediacy to it too, that I think sometimes gets convoluted with, you know, with representational imagery.

DAVID: What do you think about when you're mixing color?

ZOË: Often one of the first things I'm thinking about, you know, when I'm mixing a palette to work with is, kind of my relationship to that color.

So, like its implication to me in terms of its impact on my memories, but also my experience with this color and the connotation that it has.

Sometimes they're stereotypical connotations that societally we just have about color.

And I do like to kind of role with that, because I think that it gives people an inviting in to the work in a way that I think offers a connection between the viewer and myself in a way that's, not so alienating.

Color is like the main adjective of the piece I think it really describes, like what is happening.

And also, I think for me there's like a spiritual element to color.

It kind of helps me feel more in touch with what I don't yet know about something.

And the more I work through a color, I feel like the more it reveals to me about myself and my experience.

So I think there's a lot going on when I mix up color, and I often work in it in monochromatic segments.

You know, one just one color at a time.

I try to explore, like the full spectrum of that color and its different various hues and tones.

I guess sometimes I mix of color in a practical way, thinking about light.

Like most painters do you know what's the what's the lightest part of the piece or the darkest tone?

And, where do I want that to fall?

But usually it's a it's more of a personal emotional connection that I have to the color, which is the fundamental kind of most important part of the piece for me.

DAVID: One thing that always struck me about your paintings were those kind of very rigid frames that exist within the field.

Can you talk about that?

ZOË: I've been really interested in transparency in a lot of my work and color that is transparent because I'm interested, you know, not only in the painting as kind of this, object that you look at, the one that I want you to feel that you can observe and step into in a really physical way.

And so I've been using these kind of transparent screens of color to really function like thresholds, you know, to allow people to enter into them in a more embodied way, you know, filtered through the lens of the color that I think is pointing to the core emotion behind the work, you know, and sometimes they're more of like a frame and less of a, a window.

And I think for me, in those instances, too, it's almost like a way to say, I'm framing an intentional moment in the work that I want to spend time working through.

So it's a way for me to say I'm going to step also into, unpacking what it looks like to work through complex emotion like joy and grief coexisting.

And so it's almost like a meditative act for me to say, okay, I'm drawing this frame around this thing that I want to step into myself.

So it has kind of a multi-dimensional purpose in that way.

DAVID: Can you tell me about these small paintings?

ZOË: The idea for these small paintings actually came about, about two years ago when I started this project of miniature paintings that I had titled “Prospects”.

That was the first full project I'd ever done that was kind of answering this question that I, I started to have a ritual of asking myself when I got to the studio to work, which was, you know, what is my internal landscape of today?

And before I started working, I made a sketch on paper of that image that helped kind of guide the work that I was doing in the studio for that period of time.

And I made a bunch of these little images over time.

So many interesting things came about out of it.

And I think one major aspect of that project was that I had noticed over time that the more time I spent directly addressing this question, the less likely I was to have the kind of chronic physical aches and pains and insomnia that I generally was dealing with at the time.

I think a lot of it is related to my own relationship to anxiety and life stressors.

So it wasn't until I started my graduate program that I started to want to research more about what kind of relationship, emotion regulation strategies that use art making, you know, might have on the physical body.

So, you know, I started thinking I'd like to return to those small paintings, but this time as a researcher and really look at it from trying to understand, you know, what is it about this transference from implicit emotional information, which is like the stuff that, you know, you know, that you don't have any language or shape for yet to more explicit emotional information, like downloading all that information out of yourself into a tangible art piece.

Like, what does that do for us, and why does it seem to have an effect on the body?

I am doing an art based heuristic study, which is like a kind of qualitative research that, you know, uses my personal phenomenological experience to study this question.

So I've been making one piece every day for a month in response to this question, alongside of journal entries that talk about my day and also record my pregnancy, because it's a big part of like, what affects me physically at the moment, and using some medical scales that measure somatic symptoms as I go.

And so it's been a really interesting process so far.

And the, you know, the art products themselves, like they're the data that I have for this, you know, they're both kind of these research products, but they are familiar works of art to me that are almost like just little, time capsules to me, that kind of record, my pregnancy even at the moment, which is really beautiful.

So I haven't analyzed all this data yet, so I can't talk about the results.

But that's where the images came from so far.

DAVID: Did you want to talk about being pregnant during this process?

-ZOË: Yeah, yeah.

So I mean pregnancy has been it's been I've been really lucky, honestly, to have like a good pregnancy, you know, and feeling healthy and well enough to, to do all the things that I still love to do, you know?

I think that this particular pregnancy has had a lot of fear behind it, though, too, after, a pregnancy loss that I had last year that really was traumatic for both me and my husband.

So this time around is like, you know, so much of what has been coming up in the studio has been working through simultaneous affection for my body and skepticism towards it.

And so much overflow of love for this baby and fear about health.

And so there's just been all of this imagery coming up that works through all of that.

And so I think I'm so grateful that I am an artist and someone who can, like, work through some of this in a really, like, head on and meaningful way to me.

I mean, overall pregnancy has been great so far this time around, but there have been, like many other parts of it that have been, you know, just kind of scary, I guess too.

DAVID: Thanks for sharing that.

ZOË: Yeah.

DAVID: We've been filming this process.

Has the process of painting change because we're filming it?

ZOË: Yeah.

That was something I was really worried about initially thinking painting is such a solitary experience for me.

I don't think anyone has ever, spent long amounts of time observing how I make a work.

So I was really worried about this at first, and I was surprised to find that it was still easy for me to enter that kind of flow state where, I mean, there's nothing, nothing is going to bother my attention so long as I'm, you know, I'm in that realm.

So no, this process hasn't changed, like how I go about painting, like at all, I think.

Maybe the pace of some of the pieces, but, not the way that I have approached the process, like, at all, which is cool.

DAVID: That's great.

ZOË: Yeah.

ZOË: Thats how I am with painting.