Meet the Maker: Zoe Brand

 

Zoe Brand uses jewellery archetypes, ready mades and text to explore the performative nature of jewellery as a device for communication. She sees possibility in mundane, everyday throwaway statements, which she collects, examines and removes them from conversation and builds the text into signs.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Craft ACT had an unexcepted gap in the 2020 exhibition program and invited Zoe to present a new body of work. During this time, Zoe Brand was recuperating from the 2019-20 summer bushfires, while dealing with the outcomes of the COVID outbreak. When creating the work, Zoe planned to present a more upbeat group of works but upon completion and presented together these works offered a more sombre feeling.

"It wasn't always this way. I'm not sure I've have a chance to grieve or understand the summer bush fires that were on our doorstep for months on end. At that time it was about leaving to find safety elsewhere. And now it seems we are only safe if we stay home. The works in this exhibition aren't so much about "these times" but rather they have come about because of them. Of course they reflect them and fit into the discourse around them, but they are not stuck in them."

In her exhibition YOU ARE DOING IT AGAIN, Zoe has carefully presented 57 works that can be read as a stream of conscious or enjoyed as individual works.

"I’ve constructed my exhibition so that it reads as a piece of prose or stream of conscious, a back and forth between multiple voices. While all the pieces are individual works in their own right, arranging them in this way allowed me to place the works within a deeper narrative context, making blanks, spaces and gaps all the more important."

YOU ARE DOING IT AGAIN is now on display at Craft ACT and online until 22nd of August.

Image: Zoe Brand, TAKE IT EASY, 2020. Photo: Marshall-Brand.