Zoë Pulley

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

Hi, my name is Zoë and I’m a designer that likes stuff. By “stuff” I mean the artifacts, memories, and ephemera that gather in junk drawers, attic chests, closets, and crawl spaces. Everyday things—sometimes treasured, sometimes forgotten—that carry skills, stories, and legacies across generations. Often dismissed as unremarkable, I treat this material as an archive of Black life, memory, and time. I call my method surfacing: a way of working that challenges Western archival traditions by locating narratives within overlooked materials and bringing them forward. Surfacing reveals the everyday and spectacularly ordinary parts of life, as defined on one’s own terms. My work moves through textiles, words, and found materials—synthesizing fragments into narratives that resist legibility and easy consumption. Rather than relying on external datasets, I create my own, shaped by personal vernaculars, autodidactic practices, and inherited languages of kin. In this way, my practice becomes both a design methodology and an archival strategy: it insists that collective consciousness is not only inherited, but also made in the present. It requires constant seeing, making, teaching—on repeat. It asks us to recognize the “individual as a maker of history,” one who wields and evolves the tools passed forward. During my current residency at Smack Mellon, I am experimenting with quilting as a way to catalogue our ongoing “breaking news” cycle. Informed by Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag...

Artwork