Zoe Towne

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Zoe Towne

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Zoe Towne

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Zoe Towne

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TEDDY, 2025
2007 Saturn Vue parts including battery, passenger side door, passenger seat, back hatch door; personal belongings including bumper stickers, parking tickets, handwritten letters, crystals, lucky cat keychain, gas station receipts, lighters, scratchers, cigarettes, cd, jerry can, assorted trash and ephemera; printed photos; artist-made support frames.
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Artist Statement
In the process of creating TEDDY, I constructed an evolving installation using artifacts from my own life, informed by the methodologies Tracey Emin established in contemporary installation art. Emin’s work demonstrated that lived experience – in its raw, disordered, and unresolved forms – could serve as primary material for serious artistic inquiry. Building on this idea, I approach my life not as a narrative to be streamlined or sanitized, but as a body of material to be archived, arranged, and reinterpreted over time. The aim is not to create a coherent portrait of the self, but to make visible the ongoing, unstable processes by which identity and memory are formed.The physical components of my installation – car parts, keychains, collected letters, parking tickets – are not selected for their aesthetic qualities, but for their emotional and experiential weight. Removed from their original contexts and repositioned within an artistic framework, these objects take on new symbolic roles. This process draws directly from Emin’s use of everyday detritus to generate affective meaning, as seen in works like My Bed (1998) and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1995). However, while Emin often emphasizes rupture, crisis, and emotional extremity, this work is oriented toward quieter forms of change: accumulation, persistence, and gradual transformation.Rather than impose a fixed meaning on these collected materials, I allow the installation to remain open-ended. During my process, objects were added, removed, or repositioned based on shifts in my emotional and physical life. This temporal approach, informed by the ways Emin’s installations resist closure, enables the work to function as a living archive rather than a finished artifact. Following scholars such as Julian Stallabrass, who identifies a “constant flux” in Emin’s practice, I position my project as a site where experience and memory continue to act upon the work after its initial construction.My project also engages with the tensions inherent in self-representation that Emin’s work foregrounds – particularly the difficulty of offering personal material without reducing it to spectacle. Rather than presenting my life as a confessional narrative, I am interested in how intimacy can be framed without being aestheticized or flattened. This requires an ongoing negotiation: How much personal history can be made public before it becomes detached from its original meaning? How can the material of everyday life be recontextualized without losing its emotional charge?Ultimately, my installation is less a documentation of past experiences than an active process that remains in motion. Tracey Emin’s work provided a framework through which I could see the personal as a site of ongoing artistic inquiry, not because of its dramatic potential, but because of its capacity to embody change, uncertainty, and persistence. In my practice, I extend this approach through a slower, more accumulative process, reflecting the ways personal and material histories are built over time – through both decisive moments and unnoticed shifts.

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ME AND ALL MY SINS, 2025
acrylic paint, red wine, makeup, red thread, empty vape pods, india ink, all on unprimed canvas, nailed to the wall with rusted nails.
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When I was little, I thought about God a lot, and it always made me feel guilty.As I grew up and grew out of religion, I kept that guilt with me, and it grew. I think guilt is a lot like grief sometimes – it doesn’t get any smaller, you just grow around it. And that becomes a problem when the guilt goes unaddressed, when we learn to bear more weight instead of learning to set it down and walk away.Despite no longer seeing myself as religious, I come from a Christian background and I go to a Christian school. I was raised in Sunday school and bible studies. My name comes from it – Zoe is Greek; life with meaning, the God-kind of life. A name that only increased my guilt when I never felt I could live up to it.My process involved reliving my sins, bleeding my guilt out through these paintings. They are indexical evidence of my wrongs, art that could not exist without a sin being committed. Each painting is on raw, unframed canvas. I’ve chosen to hang them with nails, an intentional reference to crucifixion and sacrifice. The use of primarily red draws from traditional religious imagery of blood, redemption, and suffering.My first painting is called Purgatory Girl. It’s a self portrait with a halo of irony; or, as my sister pointed out, Dante’s Purgatory Mountain. In his poem Purgatorio, an ascent is made through seven terraces on the mountain, with each terrace representing a sin. In ascending order, they are Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust.My other seven paintings represent the guilt I carry for each of those sins. Each painting took a lot of introspection to unpack boxes of guilt that I forgot I owned, and the process was often visceral and emotional. I am Proud, Envious, Angry, Lazy, Greedy, Gluttonous, and Lustful. Proud to own a car and proud to drive it like a maniac, guilty for the ruin that I caused. Jealous of everything that fits into boxes I don’t. Angry and throwing wine at the wall, knowing how I choose to glaze over my own negative emotions. Lazy enough to hang up a canvas with nothing on it and call it “done”. Greedy for taking something away from where it belongs just to feel better. Gluttonous for inhaling smoke between sewing 90 vape pods onto another painting. Lustful in a way that never really connects with anyone else. These are paintings that I sinned to make, over and over, until my guilt was on the walls and not within me. These are paintings made with violence and cried over.I invite viewers to question the guilt that is unknowingly carried with them. Question whether it’s worth it, carrying something so heavy, pretending you aren’t. Whether there’s a reason to carry it at all. It might be an avoidable death, a destruction of self, a drowning out, an avoidance, a theft, an addiction, or something that probably needs to be worked out in therapy. Or it might just be guilt for all of it together, each little guilt piling on top of each other to form a mountain of purgatory that is the person you’ve become.Purgatorio insists that all sins arise out of love. This work conveys that guilt does not. If there is no God, then guilt like this serves no purpose. And if there is, then surely, they would not want you to suffer.

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