About
Zoë Ashbrook is a contemporary landscape artist living and working in Gloucestershire, UK. She graduated from University of Gloucestershire in 2023 with an MA Fine Art (Distinction).
Zoë's practice is anchored in concepts of time, landscape and memory. Working with expanded notions of sensory drawing to engage closely with the landscape and recording vignettes of interest on her mobile phone Zoë captures the experiences and observations which she returns to in the studio. Process becomes key to explorations of materiality - integrating and embedding layers of time and memory across her practice, Zoë's work iInvites us to contemplate a sense absence within fragments and traces of the past that remain ever present, both physically and as ephemeral memories of time and place.
While sketchbook mark making exercises capture an immediacy of emotive response to her experiences of time within landscape. Studio based sculptural processes provide a meditative haptic enquiry to consider the themes and ideas which fuel her interest. A painterly sensitive visual language evolves through the layering of abstract marks and gestures, where addition and subtraction play an equally significant role in the journey to completion of a painting. Zoë aspires to evoke within the viewer a reason to pause. Inviting us to spend time with the work and consider the connections through time and memory, our inner psychological worlds and the external landscapes we experience.
Zoë is a member of Walking the Land artist collective and Drawing Research Network (DRN)
Representation: The Paragon Gallery, Cheltenham, UK
Artist 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 and sculptural assemblages become a reflection on my experiences and the philosophical questioning of time, memory and landscape I find so interesting.
Woodland Dialogues
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