Zoë Wilkinson

About

Zoë Wilkinson (b.1999) is an artist and writer exploring her mixed British Caribbean heritage through the lens of the Gothic.

Zoë is supported by the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship. This year she was also a recipient of the Hesketh Hubbard Bursary and winner of the Curtis Brown Creative scholarship for Writers of Colour.

Artist Statement

I grew up in the sea, encircling my homeland in long sweeping stokes, never getting close enough to distinguish an oak from a palm. I became fascinated with the land and now I paint it. In bold colours, in memories sculpted from charcoal, on sugarcane fabric and cotton rag paper. I paint people. I mine the archives of my family, painting mothers and grandmothers and who-the-fuck-ers. I disappear on expeditions, a backwards botanist, in Kew Gardens sketching plants that were taken there long before I was. Where did I come from, and how? I have the words now, Indo-Caribbean and British but not the answers.

I am interested in the power of the imagination to answer its own questions. I stretch out my fingers in marmalade morning light, trying to snatch secrets from my dreams. I can’t catch the whisps, but I clutch a pencil and imagine. Imagine somewhere between here and there, create my own homeland. I steal back from the imposing British greenhouses that trap tropical foliage within their iron skeletons. In broad daylight, I take a visual cutting of Musa Balbisiana (Plantain) and propagate it in a bed of paint, charcoal, water and my mind.

I use my words, words on paper that bounce back from the stories echoing from across the ocean. I’m part of a canon now, shooting from Guyana to Thornfield Hall, bringing the folklore with me and unleashing it on my world. The Caribbean gothic is breathing like my portrait on the page, and me staring it down. I’ll catch it, I’ll keep it and then I’ll drink it, a potion from the past. And then I’ll watch it spread like sap across the page, let it bleed into shapes and out of them and back again. Until the magic becomes my method.