Zoe Heath © 2024
All rights reserved
I had the great privilege of benefiting from the artistic talent of Zoë Heath for my latest album, “Akousmata”, produced on the UK label Driftworks run by Andrew Heath.
I had no idea of the extent of Zoë's creative work, and an Instagram link led me to her website:
Her visual and material universe fascinates me, and I'd like to pay a little tribute to her here on my blog.
Zoë is a multidisciplinary artist who defines herself as an explorer of ephemera and texture.
She presents her work in three main categories: collages, paintings and artist's books.
Collages and artist's books are based on the same principle: the assembly of graphic fragments, signs, materials (paper, cardboard, fabric, etc.), photographs and images cut from magazines to create hybrid, unique and singular objects that cannot be reproduced. They remind me of French Surrealist poetry, such as that of Paul Eluard, for whom"the earth is as blue as an orange", or André Breton, who explored dream-like states of consciousness, notably through the use of automatic writing. I'm also thinking of Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror, with its famous image: “Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie” (“Beautiful like the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table”).
For unexpected encounters, paradoxical juxtapositions, visual metaphors and oxymorons create a special kind of beauty. Are these “chance meeting”? Or is there a hidden meaning, a profound necessity and logic to these assemblages?
Zoë's collage work also evokes the Lettrist poetry of Tristan Zara or the graphic research of the Russian formalists, suggesting a modernism that is already vintage and imbued with the melancholic patina of time. We're also reminded of children's games with stickers, which take over the space of the sheet with inventive polychromy.
What's most striking in these creations is a kind of fragility and melancholy, which makes them like memories of anonymous lives, snapshots of feelings, ideas and mental images.
One also thinks of the world of Lewis Caroll, so British, of course...
Zoë Heath's “artist's books” are magnificent artefacts created by assembling, folding and binding sheets of paper. One has the impression of opening and leafing through diaries, notebooks of “common places” and memories gleaned over a lifetime, press cuttings, letters, notes from day to day, tree leaves and dried flowers recalling a walk, a place, a day, someone.
Zoe Heath © 2024
All rights reserved
Each page, each inscription or fragment assembled in these artist's books functions as an art of memory: we enter into the intimacy of the artist and the anonymous people whose traces she has gathered, and we ourselves can project our own memories into them.
Each of these “artist's books” is unique, and also tells the story of Zoë's finds at garage sales and flea markets, like a kind of archaeology of what is most fragile in human societies: memory, sensitivity, states of mind that are both ephemeral and leave material traces.
This original, beautiful and sensitive artistic work also reminds me of musical practices.
Sampling, first of all, the art of capturing found sounds and assembling them in a composition that transforms them, changing their meaning and perception.
Then there's mixing and remixing, where the diversity of materials, both sonic and visual, come together to create an organic unity, a balance, a finalized form.
Zoë Heath samples and remixes fragments of life, signs and tactile and visual sensations, with a unique artistic sense and sensitivity.
It's a beautiful universe, and her creative contribution is a real added value for the hand-made packaging of the Driftworks CD collector's editions...
Thank you again, Zoë, for your wonderful work on my music!
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