Zoë Buckman’s you make me loud, 2022, emerges from her latest body of work BLOODWORK, exhibited at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, in September 2022, focusing on portraits of survivors of domestic abuse, illness, or other hardships, and their radical embracement of joy in the face of such adversity.
Embroidered onto vintage textile, the survivor is seen in a moment of ecstatic exaltation; with scars visible from surgeries, she has a beaming smile, and her arms are thrown up in the air in joy. Rendered in a state of dynamism, she is dancing across the fabric. Wearing a bold red lip, chunky gold Chanel necklace and red bikini, the influence of rave culture and the freedom and transformative qualities of music is visceral.
Buckman uses embroidery as a celebration of female labour and the personal domestic sphere, operating in resistance to the craft’s historical under-appreciation as a feminine artform. The physical piercing of the fabric skin with needle and thread unites a quiet violence, a disruption to the statuesque, with a decorative, if not defiant, beauty.
The images used across the BLOODWORK series are primarily drawn from photographs of people in Buckman’s close circle. By representing her peers, Buckman invokes the sociality and solidarity of women’s knitting circles and quilting groups as spaces to process and do life together. In doing so, she asks: ‘What it is to be in bodies that are… left to pick up the pieces – physical, emotional, spiritual, financial… and do the healing… In spite of these experiences… we can still exude so much joy and resilience… throw down at a dance party, and rave with our gals or our gays’.i

Zoë Buckman (b. 1985, Hackney, London) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice incorporates sculpture, textiles, installation and film. Her work is currently on display in How Do We Know the World?, Baltimore Museum of Art (2021-23). Recent exhibitions include Another Justice: Us is Them, curated by Hank Willis Thomas and For Freedoms, at Parrish Art Museum, New York (2022); Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2022); and She Says: Women, Words and Power, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (2021). Her work is held in collections at the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk.