bP: Instead of asking who influences you, we’d like to ask what you actively resist. What do you consciously push against in your work?
ZM: I resist attempting to form a fixed or controlled narrative, I like to allow enough room for ambiguity and spontaneity to exist within my works. When a piece is overexplained or overplanned, I feel it diminishes the energy built between the individual images and how they intersect and interact with one another. I’m more interested in finding this tension, making a memory feel present but not fully accessible. For me, the process of image making is a constant push and pull, trying to achieve a balance of understanding and uncertainty, which can only be found through play.
bP: You are currently exploring pigment transfer on canvas. Do you allow imperfections to remain in the final work, or do you tend towards control and precision?
ZM: Pigment transfer carries a level of unpredictability, and I lean into this lack of control whilst making my work. Most of my work is done in a single sitting, and I don’t return to correct any errors or imperfections. Instead embrace them and allow the process to dictate that part of the outcome. Relinquishing that control reflects my own experience during and post seizure, where I have little or no conscious authority. If I was fully obsessed with precision it wouldn’t be true to my own memory, where there are gaps, distortions and partial memories that never fully resolve. Allowing imperfections to exist in the work, they act as a form of residue which behave like echoes. How I bring my control back is through my decisions about composition, initial image selection and ultimately when to leave the work alone.
bP: You have spoken about living with epilepsy producing unreliable or false memories. How has that experience reshaped your trust in what you remember, and how does this enter your work?
ZM: When recalling a memory, I often experience it as an amalgamation of separate moments, seamlessly compressed together creating a new coherent fiction, which I have no reason to question not to be true. Subconsciously shifting, quietly rewriting itself over time, and I’ve learnt not to fully trust it. This unreliability feeds the way I approach my work, mirroring this lack of trust. Figures become partial, bodies fall out of context, and the image resists the ability to be pinned to an exact moment. I use repetition to lean further into this instability, the same singular memory presented numerous times, yet never fully able to grasp at which is the true recollection. Each passing seizure only heightens their manipulation and ultimate deterioration. Practices like journaling and photography have become ways of trying to regain some form of authorship over my own recollection, even if that control is always partial.
bP: Many of your figures are partially obscured or turned away. What draws you to withholding their faces?
ZM: A face has the ability to anchor a painting very quickly, and the viewer has the opportunity to identify with them through their emotion, their characteristics and personal features. By removing that possibility, I place the figures into a more abstract state, a space where they act as fragments or recollections rather than a set identity. This lack of clarity shifts the focus of the works, and I’ve found people tend to project their own narratives because there’s more room for personal interpretation and association. This act of withholding also feels closer to that of my own experience, an obscured memory that I’m left to decipher.
bP: If your work could speak, what would it accuse you of?
ZM: It would probably accuse me of holding back too much of myself and not fully trusting my own perception. I’ve mentioned I like to linger in a more obscure space, so I think it would ask: why am I afraid to move beyond the comfort of ambivalence and develop more direct figurative compositions that confront my fragmented memory with less room for concealment? A series I’m developing feels like a response to these silent accusations.
Comments
Leave a comment