Zoe Irving

Artist Profile

Zoe Irving is a multi-disciplinary artist who observes anthropogenic landscapes and our human attempt to assert order and ideology over a boundless world.

Zoe Irving is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across painting, sculpture, music and printmaking. Her work is an embodied attempt to slow down, regain appreciation of our sensory tactile existence and from that place, explore abstract ideas and theories. The brush strokes in her paintings show her rapidly moving mind, with fast colours and textures layered on top of each other, and spontaneous lines that attempt to link human and non-human worlds. Her inclusion of architectural shapes and human faces in vast landscapes invite viewers in to muse at the irony of our human attempts to turn deep geological time-scales into construction sites with site offices.

Intertwining sociology, ecological collapse, aesthetic theory and inter-personal relationships, she visually depicts these spaces through suburban open cut quarries, logging coupes on our city fringes, pylons and powerlines, straightened urban river courses, altered farmland, roadkill and our increasingly fragile emotional states that inflict and exist amongst all this. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in commercial and artist run galleries though-out Melbourne, and has completed an artist in residence program in the cultural region of Obinitsa in Estonia. Her music has been heard throughout local Melbourne venues and on community radio stations throughout Australia.

Career Highlights

• Finding of fragments of beauty in denuded landscapes
• Working at Warlukurlangu Arts Centre in YuendumuWorking at Warlukurlangu Arts Centre in Yuendumu
• Experimenting with new ideas, materials and sounds, and bouncing ideas between other people and collaborators