Zoe Young is an Australian painter whose work spans still life, portraiture, and abstraction, transforming everyday interiors and objects into immersive, cinematic scenes charged with nostalgia and quiet theatricality. In Something for Margaret, Young layers intimate studies, mid-sized scenes, and large-scale works into a tribute to her mother, harmonising domestic motifs and memory into emotionally resonant, lived experiences.
In her own words,
“I often look to cinema when constructing a body of work. In film, we are rarely watching only the characters; we are absorbing the vignettes of their lives — the landscapes they inhabit, the quiet details, the rhythm created through repetition and scale. Directors use framing, pacing and shifts in size to give a story its pulse.
I approach painting in the same way.
Throughout Something for Margaret, I work across different scales to create that cinematic rhythm. Smaller works function like scripts. They act as intimate studies, close readings, fragments of dialogue. Mid-sized paintings operate like scenes, where objects begin to interact and meaning accumulates. The larger works I refer to as video or cinematic, not because they move, but because their scale alters the viewer’s physical experience. They hold space differently. They slow you down. They surround you.
The repetition of motifs (particularly the Kosciusko silver snow daisies) builds continuity across the show. Scale shifts give the narrative its beat, its subtext, its atmosphere.
Something for Margaret is a tribute to my mother, a restaurateur whose instinct was always to bring disparate elements into harmony. The exhibition reflects that sensibility: ingredients, heirlooms, flowers, interiors — composed not just as still life, but as lived memory.
It is only now that I fully understand the quiet orchestration behind what she created.”
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