About
Zoë Ashbrook is a multidisciplinary contemporary landscape artist living and working in Gloucestershire, UK. Zoë graduated with an MA in Fine Art (distinction) at the University of Gloucestershire in 2023. She is a director of Walking the Land, an artist collective linking landscape, community and art through projects, research, exhibitions, installations, writing and shared walks with numerous artists’ other professions and wider communities.
Zoë's practice is process led and anchored in observations of time, landscape, nature and memory experienced through immersive creative walking experiences. Mindful sketchbook mark making documents an immediacy of emotive and sensory responses experienced and recorded vignettes of interest captured on her mobile phone provide fragmented moments Zoë returns to later in the studio informing digital compositions, moving image, printmaking, painting and expanded notions of drawing.
A visual language evolves through a process of repetition and layering, where addition and subtraction play an equally significant role in the evolution of the work. Zoë aspires to evoke within the viewer a reason to pause. Inviting us to spend time with the work, allowing a slow reveal and a quiet recognition of the expressions of time and memory embedded within the work, our everyday experiences and the external landscapes we pass through.
Representation: The Paragon Gallery, Cheltenham, UK
Statement
Engaging with ideas of time, memory and landscape I explore notions of entangled pasts, present and futures. Through drawing, painting and sculpture my perceptions of these evolving, entwined, sensory relationships are explored.
Process to me is key. Focusing on sensory qualities of materiality allows me to integrate a sense of meaning to each of the processes I choose to work with. The time I spend walking in landscape capturing conscious and unconscious interactions through my mobile mobile, simple sketchbook observations and autographic mark making creates the foundation for my studio practice.
Working with paper, frottage and eyes closed drawing I record sensory dialogues of touch, time and memory of place. Autographic black marks and sculpted paper outcomes exist as unique documents of experience. Explorations which exploit the uniquely sensitive quality of drawing and serve as a catalyst for further work. Paintings become a reflection on my experiences and philosophical interpretations of time, memory and landscape I find so interesting.
Woodland Dialogues