Collection: Zoe MacPhail

@courtjester_studio

zoeprineas.com

Through her unique lens as an identical twin, Zoë MacPhail delves into themes of voyeurism, gender, and identity. Her interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, paintings, and large-scale installations. Shifting from overt bodily representations, Zoë explores the anthropomorphic possibilities of objects. Identity is revealed not by corporeal boundaries, but rooted in cultural and social contexts. An ordinary sink evokes the feminine through a subtle accentuating of its basin. Zoë consistently works with everyday household appliances, transforming them to unlock their metaphorical potential as potent symbols. Etching on washing machine doors; a digital rendering of a dishwasher; screen-printed dish racks on textiles; and airbrushed images on various other domestic detritus make up a cluster of aesthetic divergences.

Zoë combines seemingly unrelated materials to elevate the ordinary to the realm of the extraordinary. She casts machine parts in cement to give them weight, embellishes with fetish-associated elements like vinyl and tassels, and increases the size of objects to an overwhelming scale. She disrupts the vernacular of the quotidian so it becomes foreign. Conflicting emotions of desire, fear and fascination are conjured and parallel her experience as a twin, living with the paradox of finding unfamiliarity in someone genetically identical.