Zoe Nelles (b. 2003) was raised in Chicago and currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Nelles is graduating with a BA in Painting and Drawing and a BA in Art History with honors from the University of Washington in June 2025.
Nelles’s paintings and artists' books dissect issues of memory, place, and time. Nelles’s work is autobiographical, transcribing the world around her into images that can be rearranged or redacted. The resulting works are evident of an attuned sensitivity to the places and moments, which speak to her connection to environment and memory. She creates an elliptical narrative that activates a sense of surprise between the image, material, and viewer. By incorporating unfamiliar objects with collected imagery from the artist's life, Nelles finds rhythm in processing life's ebb and flow.
The work fosters an intimacy between the artist and her paint, the viewer and the substrate. Found objects provide a structure for compositions to evolve and rearrange. Nelles’s practice is rooted in collage and material push and pull. The work is dependent on collecting objects and ephemera that lay aesthetic and conceptual groundwork, which are then worked into art objects. Acrylic mediums, found materials, and oils are layered in a process of collage that results in images that wrestle with the tension between precision and intuition. By remixing previously discarded objects and delicately composed compositions, the work finds confidence in mystery and hesitation.