Zoë Croggon

Zoë Croggon’s Footscray home feels like it belongs to a real grown up.
When I enter I am a shy six-year-old again, trailing close behind my mother’s ankles, on a visit to an adult family friend’s house. I remember knowing, without being told, that no matter how bored I was, when we entered these child free zones I wasn’t to touch anything. That it would be quietly awkward for the adults if I did. Walking into Zoë’s home I unwittingly re-experience this tension. I am hyper-aware, as I never normally am, of my body, and its movements; of my own presence and its potential impact on its surrounds.
It is a home that occupies that peaceful nook of adult living, between the equal and opposite chaos’s of the twenty-something share-house, and the family home.
The interior of the house is sleek and minimal, the kitchen is clean. Everything seems to have a specific place and a fastidiously upheld order. There are sleek, sharp corners, pristine white benches, a grand polished dining table with no scratches. Light dapples the space through the large French windows that face onto the leafy courtyard.
Half of the open plan living area is a shared studio space for Zoë and her housemate. On her desk there are a few neatly stacked piles of carefully kept books, and a desktop computer. Next to it is a floor length shelf, filled with more books, on a diverse array of grown-up topics, from classic literature, to art theory, to architecture.
Priceless objects live happily on precarious perches. Zoë’s works from her most recent show at West Space, Pool are propped lightly against the wall, and one of her sculptures sits under the desk.
This house marks Zoë’s first departure from the family home. She shares with her partner, Martin, and their two housemates, Chris, and Ruby, a newly married couple. While by definition it is a share-house, Zoë’s is not the typical first share-house experience.
Zoë complements the space. Her movements are attuned to her surrounds with an effortless poise. Her petite frame is attired in her standard uniform, a black turtleneck and cream capris, with her long hair trailing free down her back. Her physicality and dress are reminiscent of one of the ballerinas from her collages. Even her casual movements and gestures have the look of being diligently practiced.
This discipline manifests in the creative rhythm of her practice. “I like to do one thing, and to try to do it as much as I can until I can do it well,” she says.  “Obviously I enjoy making the work, but I definitely have a fairly clinical and dutiful approach to it,” she says.
“It’s not like the passionate artist, swishing paint around,” she says. “It’s very much that I have to do this work, and I sit down and do the work.”
Zoë’s main focus since graduating with Honours at the VCA in 2011 has been on further developing her distinctive brand of photo-collage. She has been showing her work constantly since at many galleries and artist run spaces throughout Melbourne, including TCB, West Space, and Seventh gallery, and at the NGV and the Monash University Museum of Art. She has recently received representation from Daine Singer gallery. She is currently working towards her upcoming solo show there in November of this year. Her collages, composed largely in black and white, juxtapose human subjects with natural imagery, landscapes, and architecture, exploring unexpected aesthetic and conceptual continuities between them. She describes her process in a hyper-structured “nutshell.” Her descriptions, while charmingly and warmly toned, are always pithy and precise. She is not one to mince words.
She splits her process into two practical halves. The first, “is collecting images and collating found material, and then assembling them.” She casts a wide net when looking for source imagery, her trawl encompassing “magazines, tour guides, dance catalogues, everything.” She exclusively uses printed source images, mostly due to the quality of the images available.
“Images on the web are 99% of the time very low quality and pixelate very easily, making them difficult to work with,” she says. “When you manually scan an image it picks up a lot of tonal and figurative detail, so not a lot is lost in translation.”
While she has utilised internet images before, the collage has ended up having to be scaled down to accommodate for the lower quality.
She also finds it difficult to assess the formal qualities of an image when it is mediated by a screen. This, coupled with the sheer volume of available source imagery makes the task of selecting images through this medium seem near impossible. Using print sources allows her a more manageable approach.
The quality of the print images she utilises, however, is a consideration, but not a strict pre-requisite. “I hope that they will allow to be enlarged, or disrupted.”
“I sometimes work with imagery that is quite low quality, and you can either choose not to use it, or to use that pixellation, and to use that distortion.”
While her work began on a smaller scale she has progressively been creating much larger print sizes. “There’s a bit of an anxiety about filling gallery space in terms of sizing up. I like having different sizes, but I will also tailor them to the gallery space,” she says.
“When I have enough I make a selection of the imagery and then manually examine it,” she says. “So I’ll choose one image, or a landscape, and I’ll decide that’s the one I want to make a work out of.”
The first image she chooses has to meet a series of rigorous personal criteria. “It has to have an aesthetic appeal that allows for abstraction, or allows for an interruption, so if it’s an image that’s too iconic or too in itself, or too idiosyncratic, or too recognisable, I probably won’t want to use it,” she says.
“What I’m doing is interfering with the image, in combination with the other image, and it becomes a single entity which is disassociated from it’s referent,” she says.
The second half of the process is a laborious series of trials, where she will attempt to pair the image against every other image she has pooled. “It’s very protracted and very arduous, and it’s basically me folding pieces of paper until I feel as though I have developed a relationship between two images, aesthetically and conceptually, that makes sense to me,” she says.
Her process is highly regimented, but she is often surprised by the imagery that results. “Within the process you find the changes,” she says.
The images are necessarily fragmented to the point that their context becomes indiscernible.
“There’s not a lot of difference between a black and white study image of a dancer from the past or now,” she says. “And with the architecture I’m using, some of it is from the Bauhaus era and some of it is quite modern, and often you will think, this is this, but it’s just a slice of it, and it can be harder to place.”
She then scans the images digitally and prints them. Her use of collage is quite “matter of fact,” in that it is a simple gesture of collocation, presented in a way so as to entrust the audience to relate the images, both psychologically and conceptually.

Zoë divides her thought process when making collage work into three main layers.
First and foremost she considers her work to be formal, “where you’re removing something from it’s function, you’re reducing it to an object.”
She wishes to impart an appreciation of an object for its formal qualities alone; it’s “line shape, contour, colour, tone.”
Her formal inspiration is drawn mainly from Cubism, she says, and minimal architecture.
There’s also a psychological element to her pieces, where she wants her work to imbue a feeling of “subconscious recognition.”
“Subconsciously,” she says, “you expect an image to be completed, and full, so you complete it, psychologically, and the image makes you sense.”
“You have that compulsion for recognition, to make visual similes,” she says.
The third concern of her work is her exploration of “how the body interacts with its environment, so things like psycho-geography, thinking about the way that your surroundings affect your behaviour, or the way that you shape them or they shape you.”
While her subject matter is necessarily divorced from its source, there are recurrent visual motifs in her work. Her pieces are saturated by imagery of contemporary dance, classical ballet and architecture.
Her interest in dance is both personal and conceptual. “When I was younger I did ballet quite a lot, and then I stopped doing it, and then when my mother started reviewing a lot of theatre, she was reviewing dance a lot and she would take me along, if she had no one to go with,” she says.
“It became something that I was interested in again, and seeing a lot of, and then I started doing it again,” she says.
“The physical manifestation of doing it and then seeing it quite a lot, made me interested in the body as a vehicle of communication,” she says.  She became particularly interested in the idea of the body or body parts, and their gestures, as symbolic objects with the potential to carry a meaning disassociated from their owner.
Her interest in architecture, and its physical manifestation in her work, is conceptually based in notions of psycho-geography.
“I’m interested in structures, and this idea behind a lot of architecture that it shapes lifestyles, or shapes behavior, it shapes sensations and feelings of what people feel within it or around it,” she says.
“I think a lot of modern architecture, whether it is sterile, or geometric, is quite beautiful, and I think it’s quite in line with a lot of contemporary dance as well,” she says. She observes symmetry between the “rigid posed forms” of the architectural images and contemporary forms of dance. In her collage images the figures literally affect one another; a boxer’s hand dissolves into a face, becoming fracture-lines in a cross-section of rock, a bent dancer explodes into a furl of smoke. There is a sense of the images leading into one another in sweeping, powerful movements.
Her predominant use of black and white imagery wasn’t initially intentional. “I had a black and white scanner at the time, I didn’t have the option of colour.”
However, it was also apparent to her that the images she was primarily drawn to were black and white, both for their tonal beauty and for their ability to be more easily visual compared. “When you introduce colour into it it’s surprisingly much more difficult,” she says.
“Not that that’s a problem per se, but I found that when I was making colour works, they became a lot more about the colour than the form.”
With an emphasis on tonality over form, and line, her methodology for working with colour is decidedly different, though equally interesting to her.
Creating colour works is something she aspires towards for every exhibition, but she says she has only been able to make two successful realisations of this technique thus far.

Zoë first became interested in art in her teenage years, where she was encouraged to pursue it seriously by her high school art teacher. She applied for both Arts at Melbourne and Fine Arts at the VCA, and was surprised when she was accepted to the latter course.
“Going to the VCA I never thought that I would be an artist, I actually wanted to become a writer,” she says.
“For the first year or two I didn’t even know what I was doing there, and I didn’t really take it very seriously,” she says.
The more she practised art, however, the more she realised it was something she really wanted to do.
“In a way it was kind of just a happy accident,” she says. “The more I did it the more I thought that this was something I could do seriously.”
Her specific interest in collage stems from her fastidious compulsion for collecting imagery. “I always very anally collected things, and if I found something I liked then I’d want it, so I would scan it, or I’d go to the news agency in Williamstown, and photocopy everything, not for any particular reason,” she says.
“But at the VCA, in second year, we were given an assignment to make a photo collage in response to a poem, and I did that, and I enjoyed it, and I felt like it made sense for me,” she says.
“It was a way of thinking about line between two images, because up until then I had been doing a lot of print making, and then was always that focus on the line, and the form, she says.
“It was the same notions just transferring into a different medium I suppose, and then I just kept doing it, and kept doing it, and kept doing it, and it really stuck with me, it made sense to me as a medium.”
When she was first interested in collage she used to investigate other collage artists, but now she rarely does. These days she is more interested in reading theory about it.
The first collage artist she took interest in was John Stezaker, a British artist, whose work utilises a similar formula, in the juxtaposition of a figure against a landscape.
“When I first came across him it was this huge thing,” she says.
It was the first time she recognised that there was a precedent for this kind of work.
”I read interviews with him and he was talking about things that I was interested in as well, which was also a bit disheartening, but then also really encouraging, because people potentially find it interesting.”
Her use of collage means that she needs to be considerate of copyright regulations. “I do make an effort to write to people asking for copyright permission,” she says. “But because a lot of the material I use is from the 1980s, often addresses change and it’s hard to track people down but I do have copyright permission from a great deal of owners of the work,” she says. And it’s also started some fascinating conversations with other artists, like Susie Fitzhugh.  The first every collage she made utilized one of the artist’s photos.
When Zoë contacted Fitzhugh she was extremely positive about her work, and it led to an inspiring exchange between the two artists. “She lives in Seattle, and she asked me to visit her,” she says. “She was so kind about it and generous.”
This encouragement further stimulated Zoë’s efforts, contributing to her confidence to seriously pursue this art form.
While many other collage artists attest that using found imagery is essential to their process, Zoë doesn’t see it as a necessity. She was recently awarded a grant by the Australian Arts Council. With it she plans to purchase a digital camera, and to begin taking her own photographs, which she would be interested in implementing into her collages. It’s something she has done before, “photographing textures or shapes,” and “a few buildings” and is interested in exploring further.
”That is definitely something that I’m very interested in doing because it allows you to choose your subject.”
She admits that another benefit to this way of working is that “it erases any ideas around copyright.”
Personally, collage work also appeals to Zoë’s tendencies toward control.
“We’re buffeted with so many images every day,” she says. The work, she says, is partially about “being able to harness one image, to silence the image flow.”
“You choose one thing and it’s like that stops the flow, and I’m able to focus on one thing,” she says.
“It’s psychologically a way of controlling that, so by making a choice or a decision and choosing one image and just working with that, and making sense of that,” she says.
She is reads a lot of theory on Cubism, and architecture. However, it usually enters her work as “post-rationalisation,” whereby she observes elements of the theory in her already completed work. “It enriches the work further but it isn’t the catalyst for the work,” she says.

When Zoë is creating a body of work she attempts to make it comprehensive. “You make one thing and try to make other things work with it,” she says.
She attempts to group her work in terms of her exhibitions, as a way of helping her to “structure,” her process. She is conscious of creating a harmonious collection, without internal clashes.
Her most recent show, Pool, at West Space gallery in Melbourne’s CBD, featured several photo collage works and one video piece. The show’s name was influenced by her process, where she “was pooling together all this imagery, and actually, in a lot of the imagery I’m using interiors of swimming pools.”
The show also included a video work, which featured a “dancer shifting in and out of a pool of light.”
Her use of video was something she has planned since the beginning of the year, wanting to revisit the medium after her experimentations with it while at the VCA. She was inspired by a piece by the Netherlands Dance Theatre called Fallen Angels.
“There’s this one piece of about five seconds, where all these dancers recede into the background and do these really simple actions, and it’s completely dark, and you can only see their arm, and there’s a solo going on in front of it.”
“But I thought it was a very beautiful idea and I wanted to extend it,” she says.
“I asked my old ballet teacher Natasha if she would be interested in doing it and she was, and I sent her all the work that I had ready for the show, and she looked at the pieces and tried to formulate a movement for every single work and we’d have meetings, and talk about them and how we could shape them,” she says.
“A lot of the choreography came together on the day of filming,” she says.
“But I mean I suppose there’s the suggestion or implication of movement, or dynamism, within the work anyway, and this was a way of making it explicit,” she says.
The video work has a particularly haunting beauty. The figure of the dancer, cropped by its movements into the channel of light is brought back to its surreal essence. The effect is surreal, and hypnotic.
While “collage is the core,” of her practice, “it doesn’t mean necessarily that that’s what I’ll always be doing.”
Her work has also begun to encompass sculptural pieces, assembled from Perspex, which manifest continuations of formal elements of her collage pieces.
“It’s something that doesn’t come very naturally to me but it’s something that I’d like to pursue more.”
“It will focus on tone, so black and white tone, or on reproduction in terms of image reproduction, or shape and form.” While she doesn’t have a rigid conceptual basis to it as of yet it is something she is interested in exploring further.
Along with video, and sculpture, she also entertains the idea of working with dance, movement and sound, to further reflect on the dynamism and other qualities of her images. She is interested in collaboration, although she is not sure in what form. “I just do one thing constantly, and that can be really, boring, but arduous, or laborious, which I don’t mind but it can also be great working with other people, which I’d never really done before ever because I am a control freak.”
After we finish talking I take Zoë’s picture. It’s not something she’s comfortable with. Adept at carefully constructing images, she feels nervous having someone else at the helm, relinquishing her own image to them. This surrender is antithetical to her “approach to everything in life,” which she half-jokingly refers to being, “thorough, or anal, either/or.”
Forays into collaboration she says, may well “refresh,” her creative energy by allowing her to “change things up.” Permitting other choreographers to infiltrate may help to evolve her well-crafted routine. And there may be some reward to relinquishing a little of her control.

You can see more of Zoë’s work here. She is represented by Daine Singer gallery and has an upcoming solo show there in November.