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.

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