Zoe Maxwell is a Manchester born artist, currently based in Leeds. Working predominantly in oil paints, she creates paintings that stretch the distance between memory and accuracy.
Focusing on a reconfiguration of recollection over reproducing the past.

Photographs act as a catalyst for her work as they are intrinsically linked to memory, storing external memories. We also trust photographs to provide a true account of the past. The process each piece undergoes mimics that of episodic memory, past experiences that are recontextualised or decontextualised from initial encoding through recall.

While she mostly shows paintings, drawing is integral to each piece. Through drawing she begins to introduce new traces bringing forward a scene that derives from the original source material, which is then extended through the handling of paint. Working in oil paint allows the work to remain malleable as the scene comes into being and offers alternative possibilities for the scene to shift into another variation of recollection.

Within the discussion of memory theory, she takes a constructivist approach, exploring what memory might be when accuracy is detached. Maxwell became interested in the fallibility of memory after a family member suffered a brain tumour, impacting their ability to recall with the same veracity. Until then, she perceived truth to be instinctual to the act of remembering
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Her paintings aim to question the reliability of recollection, whilst also doubting the truth we project onto captured image. In each piece she strives to bring a focus as to how time and experience is marked and stored within the painted surface. A subtle sense of disruption or fleetingness emanates from the surface as structured lines are broken by a dragged mark that sit closely next to areas within the painting that have been blurred to obscurity. Attention is diverted across the scene; a strong sense of clarity is deliberately difficult to grasp.

Illusive scenes anchored to a reality, are constructed as past, present and hypothetical futures are entwined within one scene. Her work is independent of time and is so deliberately as without an orientation viewers are encouraged to create their own associations to the scene. Within her work she allows viewers to question the veracity of recollection in a playful and imaginative way as she constructs confabulations that sit between the possibilities of what was, what could have been and potentially what could be.