Zoe Landau Konson

About Zoë Landau Konson

Zoë Landau Konson is a London based artist and designer who creates large eye catching sculptures that are commemorative and intriguing.

She grew up in a creative, refugee family deeply affected by the aftermath of displacement but brimming with stories, secrets and the unconventional. Her parents, escaping their background, searched for another identity and filled their home with a constant stream of exotic visitors from many countries; film directors, creative’s and a variety of people that regularly came to stay. Her doctor father, a gifted musician, drew cartoons, wrote limericks and went out gigging with his guitar. Her mother, the first female photo journalist in Fleet Street, travelled the world taking photographs of the famous, later becoming a successful jewellery designer. Her parents spoke Italian at home; a ‘secret’ language all three children understood. Five years of holidaying in Italy and eating Italian food at home were replaced by frequent trips to Greece and immersion in all things Greek. Later, India took its place and the search for a new identity continued.

This environment had a huge impact on Zoë and the recurring themes that now influence her work are generated by a fascination with these memories, stories and often complex family relationships. Her work explores ideas drawn from this legacy and their effect; identity, memory, repression, desire, absence and loss.

Zoë’s work is largely knitted or crocheted, using the only two crochet stitches her grandmother taught her. Sometimes, she produces wrapped and stitched textiles. Her method of construction consists of making multiples of similar shape and uniting them in a final assemblage. It’s an incredibly repetitive way of working but compulsive. Zoë is also creating a body of work using hair and architectural structures. Both hair and architecture seem perfect metaphors for some of the themes that are central to her work, as well as embodying a sense of time and history.

“My work plays with the uncertainty, possibilities and longing within each of us and the sometimes ambiguous way we express that to the outside world. Many of my pieces teem with a mass of tactile and seductive bodily forms which tempt, naughtily, and yet conceal something much more vulnerable”.

I think the repetition represents a way of creating order, especially because some of the themes I’m working with generate chaos. There’s also something significant about the ritual of transforming repeated moments into something substantial”.

In 2010 Zoë was shortlisted for the Art of Giving exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery and since then she has been making sculpture full time. She is starting to gain an international reputation with work in private collections in the USA and several pieces on display at The Fries Museum in Holland. Zoë’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions and she has just been offered her first solo show in London.