Zoë Gardner
Zoë Gardner is an artist, performer and writer native to London. In multiple disciplines including journaling, sculpture and poetry, she works from the personal to invite participatory connections. Mutual peer support is integral to her practice. She journals as @limberdoodle on Instagram, a practice born when the pandemic interrupted interactive work in her local community. Her mother record book was created as a place to keep the poems she wrote while breastfeeding in the dark, transcribing the scrawls made by unseen hand in the morning. It is both a tactile personal object, made from her babies’ pyjamas, and a project, made in public spaces – by necessity – and in order to provoke conversation. Tabs extend from the pages, pop-up style, with prompts for others to record, notice, and value their own maternal experience. The self-sustaining nourishment and nurture of the breastfeeding dyad continues to inspire her both as a theme and a guiding principle. She is drawn to unpicking paradox and uncovering everyday mysteries and shared understandings that run counter to the prevailing culture. Her work challenges the binary vocabulary of self/other, pain/healing, accident/design, rest/work, surrender/activism. She aims to articulate and recognise a grassroots movement of Care that may already exist without formal organisation.
