Joy Zhou
I work with space as the medium and my creative process is responsive to our experience with built environments, materials, and ecological relations. I spend time walking around place as part of my research and understanding the politics of the built environment through my bodily experiences. These processes led to projects that are iterative and often spanned across longer research, allowing personal connections to emerge with the context.
The Melting Well reflects upon the sedimentary quality of rock, particularly limestone – a key material quarried in Kandos for the making of cement – and the way it holds history, layer by layer. Working with household water, local people and their freezers, the artist builds a well with ice bricks, speaking to the construction of collective memory, and providing a refrain to the monuments scattered around Kandos. The hole of the well remains speculative, as a threshold connecting what is visible to what is not. As the ice melts overnight, The Melting Well asks: what does it take to be remembered? The installation transforms – into water, into ground, into relationships formed through collective making.
