When you first encounter Zoë Paul’s work, you’re not sure what you are seeing. Disembodied torsos rest on tree stumps, their chests swathed with either war paint or graffiti; a beaded curtain reveals a voluptuous, genderless figure; a half-finished fiber design emanates from a disused industrial grille.

Paul’s work utilizes a variety of materials, including ceramics, bronze, drawing, and textiles. Born in 1987 and citing her South African heritage and upbringing in both the UK and the Greek islands as a continued source of inspiration, the artist borrows image-making techniques from a wide expanse of human history to reflect modes of creation ranging from prehistoric cave paintings to virtual reality consoles. Her installations melt the contemporary into the timeless, combining modern materials and abstraction with painstaking craftsmanship.

Paul’s installations—which often require a performative element from the viewer through interaction, conversation, or creation—articulate how much has been lost since domestic craftsmanship and storytelling gave way to decentralized communication and the assembly line. In recalling both the Odyssey and Instagram, the artist invites the viewer to approach her installations with a slow, curious gaze.

An embroidered refrigerator grille references communal meals that were the norm before refrigeration but are no longer necessary. Crude human figures are created only after thousands of tiny hand-rolled beads are painted, fired, and arranged. A prostrate woman is depicted though an assemblage of tiles, in a pose that recalls both the open-air theaters of ancient Greece and advertisements on the London Underground. Paul explains her continued resurrection of intricate techniques: “In my practice, the whole lengthy effort is incredibly important, and the work is just a talisman of the process. If we don’t keep revisiting these things, all we’ll have is just devalued mass-produced things.”¹

As a result, nothing in Paul’s work is quite what it seems. Her installations cry: Patience. Look again.

Note
1. Anastasiia Fedorova, “In Athens, Zoë Paul Salvages Art from Crisis,” VICE, November 8, 2017, https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/zmzw7j/zoe-paul.