Arts Thread

Zoë Wilkinson (b. 1999) is a British-Caribbean artist. Born and raised in the UK, Wilkinson’s practice endeavours to create an imagined homeland between Guyana and Britain. Using family photographs, autofiction and tropical greenhouses, she makes her world tangible through charcoal and paint. Drawing from an academic background in philosophy, Wilkinson uses Caribbean folklore to reinterpret the gothic beyond the western canon. These postcolonial approaches are made apparent through the use of non-traditional materials which recall legacies of indentured labour such as sugarcane fabric and charcoal, handmade from driftwood. Wilkinson uses writing to build her imagined world. In her large scale works words appear and disappear from the sugarcane paintings according to the randomness of the sunlight which illuminates them. This allows the work itself to become a magical object, transcending the traditional limits of the gallery space and becoming reminiscent of Caribbean folklore. The use of ultramarine blue oil references the colonial history of western art as well as recalling her ancestor’s sea passage according to the whims of the British Empire.  Wilkinson has just completed her MA in Painting from The Royal College of Art for which she was grateful to benefit from the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship. In 2025 she won a Hesketh Hubbard Bursary for life drawing and was shortlisted for the inaugural Jaguar x RCA prize. She had just been appointed as an Honorary Fellow at the University of Guyana.