Zoë Paul

Zoë Paul (born 1987) is a London-born, Athens-based artist raised by South African parents. She combines traditional techniques with products of industrial waste to examine community, craft and domestic spaces.

Early life and education Zoë Paul's parents came to Greece from South Africa during the apartheid era. Paul was born in 1987 and grew up in the United Kingdom and Greece, on an island of Kythira. Due to her family's limited resources at the time, Paul learned how to work with various materials at an early age. She studied sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts, where she received her BA, and at Royal College of Art in London, where she earned her MA.

Work and career Paul uses sculpture, drawing, and textile to explore domestic spaces. Her work is particularly inspired by blurred lines between the interior and the exterior. As Paul is a trained sculptor, her art has also been influenced by Classical Greek sculpture.

Exhibitions Paul's solo exhibition Solitude and Village blended the divine with the domestic, featuring disembodied clay heads, frescoes of giant nudes, and sculptures inspired by Modern Primitivism. The show incorporated weavings made from discarded materials and abstract compositions resembling religious icons. Ethereal screens depicted archetypal female figures, highlighting themes of fertility and emotional power. The exhibition explored the intersection of sacred and everyday life, the tension between feminine and masculine, and the relationship between solitude and community, ultimately reflecting on the loss of communal connections due to industrialization. This exhibition was inspired by Eastern European mythology and folkloric rituals of making dolls to invite the arrival of spring.

Paul's work has also been included in the Unorthodox exhibition at the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) and in The Equilibrists exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens.