+

2016

whip

eros+thantos

thumb

warm dark

headlong

sunless

navel

2015

cross

kink

lull

pound

swan

2014

concrete #1

concrete #3

concrete #4

2013

dive #4 (splash)

dive #3

gymnast #1

bow

gymnast #2

hall

untitled

blow

2012

jetee

untitled #3

untitled #5

untitled #6

fonteyn

challeenger

2010

black+white #2

black+white #4

Zoë Croggon

http://www.zoecroggon.com

Zoë Croggon is an emerging artist based in Melbourne whose recent practice is characterised by sophisticated collages of deceptive simplicity. Drawing on personal experiences of studying ballet and dance, and how that informs her understanding of architectural spaces, Croggon’s photo-collages see human forms forced into visual dialogue with images of architecture and natural sites. Her disparate source images come from magazines, newspapers and books

There is an interesting division within the methodology of collage, which can be seen as an inherently violent medium: the destruction of an image, the aggressive theft of previously existing material, the slicing of the body, and so on. Likewise, collage can be seen as contemplative, delicate and incidental, even remedial. I see collage as simultaneously destructive and constructive, a way of distilling new forms and compacting the place and self. I think at the same time as this constricting and refining of material there is also a conceptual slackening at play, a loosening of the framework with which we view the world, especially the quotidian. At the crux of the work is the malleability of form and definition; as Proust says in Remembrance of Things Past (volume 3), ‘the creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day’.

The inversion and collision of figure and landscape reduces the body and its environment to classically architectonic forms, questioning our agency within our environment. My work poises the human form and its built environment as precise equals – the body no longer occupying space and space no longer determining the body, but each existing only in relation to the other, completed by the other.

especially how the gradual reintroduction of light renews awareness of our surroundings, as though this moment of darkness briefly resets our perspective. That is really what I am looking for in my work, a sort of illumination of the formal qualities of the familiar, a freshening of observation. This idea of light and dark also resonates with the anatomy of photography, as John Berger says in the Ways of Seeing (1972): ‘What makes photography a strange invention … is that its primary raw materials are light and time’.

Zoe Croggon - Arc from Matej Sitar on Vimeo.