Places Pulled by Zoe Maxwell

Through her painting practice, Zoe Maxwell pulls at the tether between place and memory, exploring the space that is created away from strict truth and fixed spaces. Her paintings depict shared public and domestic spaces, commonplaces that are often left out of the sequence of recollection.

Transitional spaces and passing places both found in an urban setting and within a home are held and presented to the audience as she invites us to dwell as if on a street corner, leaning within a doorway or waiting in line. Through an approach informed by memory processes of encoding and retrieval, Maxwell combines past, present and hypothetical futures within her paintings. The compositions are taken from a variety of structures we use and inhabit, however through the process of making, traces from elsewhere are introduced and the scenes becomes decontextualised bringing a broader sense of familiarity.

Maxwell’s work centres around the sequence of memory and how we recall place. She presents commonplaces as settings for confabulations that sit between the possibilities of what was, what could have been and potentially what could be.

Places Pulled is Zoe Maxwell’s debut solo show. This collection of paintings continues the themes within Maxwell’s practice, with a focus on the transactional and transitional public spaces which become the overlooked backdrops of our repeated routines and journeys.