2025

Zoe Brand

IT COULD GO EITHER WAY

5 sep. — 8 nov. 2025

Goulburn Regional Gallery

Install images of Zoe Brand’s exhibition ‘IT COULD GO EITHER WAY’ at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, 2025, Silversalt Photography.

Witty, thoughtful, and sometimes cynical, Zoe Brand’s work explores the performative nature of jewellery as a device for communication. Using jewellery archetypes, ready-mades, and text, the artist finds potential in mundane, every day, throwaway statements—collecting, examining, and extracting them from casual conversation to transform into objects to be worn. In her practice, Brand engages with the ambiguity and slippages of language, exploring the multiple readings and associations of single words or statements.

Presenting a new exhibition in Gallery 2 titled IT COULD GO EITHER WAY, Zoe Brand exploits the transcripts of closed captioning sound effects and music cues. Since 2019, Brand has collected these snippets when she first turned on closed captioning after bringing her newborn home from the hospital. She is both fascinated and amused by these textual descriptions of sounds and music that include phrases [JAZZY FRENCH MUSIC], [WAILING HYSTERICALLY], [MUZAK PLAYING], and [SUDDEN SILENCE]. In previous exhibitions, these captions have appeared sparingly, as pithy punctuation marks. In this exhibition, Brand is going all in. Texts are pressed into thin sheets of aluminium and transformed into signs. Presented on slick, white, stylised shop fittings these objects invoke the familiar visual language of retail, hung in multiples, as feature pieces, or loitering in bargain bins, texts present a comic-tragic narrative of our time.

[EXHALES]

Zoe Brand September 2025

Zoe Brand: It could go either way

Essay by Hamish Sawyer

“I don’t want more choice, I just want nicer things!” (1)

Edina Monsoon, the designer-clad, status-obsessed antihero of the 1990s British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, foreshadowed the internet age’s obsession with fashion and celebrity. PR maven Edina wore 90s brands like LACROIX and DKNY emblazoned across her body, the bigger the font, the better. As the above quote suggests however, even Edina occasionally felt the void created by endless choice and hyper-consumption.

Zoe Brand’s wearable artworks embody a similar anxiety, updated for the 21st century. With their bold-faced, pithy yet ambiguous slogans, made using industrial and reclaimed materials, Brand’s objects reflect the struggle of being an ethical artist in late-stage capitalism, challenging the traditional hierarchy of mediums by elevating design forms, and in doing so, underlining the enduring, inherent tension between art and commerce; even Brand’s surname reminds us that we live in a 24/7 online shopping mall.

The artist’s playful approach to the market has included making sculptural brooches out of discarded exhibition vinyls (Gallery De/Install Brooch), and limited-edition necklaces embossed with texts from point-of-sale displays, such as ONLY ONE LEFT, NO VALUE, LAST CHANCE, and SOLD. There is an absurd humour in removing these fragments of language from their original context and placing them on the body. Brand is open about her own complicity in the system: “I’m definitely having a go at how we consume things/ everything, but at the same time I’m asking you to buy my work.”

For her recent solo exhibition, It Could Go Either Way, Brand transformed a corner of Goulburn Regional Gallery into an alluring retail installation. The artist painted the walls a vivid blue, in a nod to Californian conceptual artist John Baldessarri (himself influenced by the aesthetics of advertising), the pop of colour juxtaposed against the white metal display furniture. Rather than shying away from the language of visual merchandising, Brand leans into it, all the better to showcase her collectible forms.

While the modestly scaled, aluminium signs and neckpieces appear like the artist’s previous works, the source material for their letter-pressed texts is new. Brand collected closed captioned descriptions of sound from television series and films, as varied as [YELLS IN FRUSTRATION], [FORCED LAUGH], and [GRIM BATTLE MUSIC]. Such descriptions, represented on-screen by square brackets, are now ubiquitous thanks to the rise of streaming platforms. In taking away both the visual, and the actual sound, Brand enlists the viewer to recall what a [DOG BARKING] or [CLOCK TICKING] for example, sounds like to them. In asking the audience to bring their own associations to these phrases, Brand highlights the subjectivity of language.

Collectively the texts suggest a multitude of narratives, in contrast to the funny and thought-provoking one-liners Brand utilised in earlier works. Depending on individual preferences etc, they can theoretically be re-ordered in any number of sequences. In assessing the changing role of language in Brand’s work, it is useful to think about conceptual artists of the 1960s and 70s, for whom text was both the medium and the message. In particular, Aleks Danko’s singular word plays across printed media and sculptural installations feel like a relevant precursor:

“ Words become sounds, isolated syllables and letters, material building blocks rather than embodied communication tools. By rearranging the usual connections between them, Danko challenges our assumptions about the relationship between words, objects and ideas.” (2)

Although Danko is primarily concerned with critiquing cultural, political and political discourses, his use of words as material for his art feels more closely aligned to where Brand’s practice is now at, rather than the witty one liners of Edina Monsoon.

Essay by Hamish Sawyer (October 2025)

1. Absolutely Fabulous Season 3, Episode 4, Jealous. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0504675/fullcredits/

2. Milner, Jacqueline, ‘Aleks Danko’, MCA Collection Handbook, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia https://www.mca.com.au/collection/artists/aleks-danko/

Zoe Brand - 2025

[FOOTSTEPS APPROACHING]

[INAUDABLE VOICES]

[INDISTINCE CHATTER]

[DOG BARKING]

[CLOCK TICKING]

[WOMAN SOBBING]

[BIRDS CHIRPING]

[ALARMBLARING]

[FORCED LAUGH]

[EXHALES]

[YELLS IN FRUSTRATION]

[JAZZY FRENCH MUSIC]

[BRIGHT POP MUSIC]

[SOFT FUTURISTC MUSIC]

[BURST OF DISCORDANT MUSIC]

[GRIM BATTLE MUSIC]

[HEAVY SIGH]

Signs and neckpieces

Pressed aluminium (and cord)

Signed and dated

Dimensions variable

ZOE BRAND

HOW DOES IT HAPPEN

8th – 29th March 2025

Masterworks Gallery - New Zealand

HOW DOES IT HAPPEN is new solo exhibition by Australian artist Zoe Brand. Known for humorous and pithy text-based works, in this exhibition Brand swaps out acrylic and metal for drapey remnant fabrics in her latest series SOFT TEXTS. Oversized brooches/pins tell an uncertain tale. Each fold of fabric anchors a singular statement that loosely converse with the pieces on either side, bouncing back and forth in a conversation between the artist and audience, but whose line is whose? Included in this exhibition are other recent works that help punctuate the comic tragic tale of an artist’s process, or a conversation with a small human or a comment about a world on fire.