Zoe Young's portrait of Elizabeth David 'One's palate is one's own.'

Zoe Young’s recent body of work grew from a self-imposed “camera detox.” Determined to paint only from life, she set herself the task of seeing without mediation; of unlearning the instant, image-ready habits rewarded by the capitalist attention economy of the present. What began as an act of discipline became a meditation on perception, temporality and the quiet structures of daily life. The results reveal an artist who approaches her own process with equal parts sincerity and mischief, finding lyricism in the small rituals that anchor daily life.

In her Southern Highlands studio, Young paints what surrounds her: food on the kitchen table, the movement of light across a wall, her son on the brink of adolescence. Working fast between school hours, each session is like a sprint, brief and concentrated, leaving visible traces of their making. The paintings feel alive with movement and thought, their brushwork recording moments of hesitation, adjustment, neurosis and delight.

Ever attuned to contradiction, Young brings a dry wit to her work. The camera detox, for instance, was conceived as an experimental protest against convenience; yet the many handwritten notes and snapshots documenting her progress were emailed to me while preparing this essay — a self-aware nod to the impossibility of total abstinence from the lens. The irony underscores what these works so elegantly perform: technologies today are habit-forming by design, which makes renouncing them through digital platforms a stark paradox.

This balancing act extends to her subject matter. Young’s paintings inhabit the porous boundary between art and life, where domestic scenes become vessels for formal inquiry and contemplation. Her humour pokes at the process, allowing room for spontaneity and accident. The table, the kitchen sink, the unruly garden all becomes fields of perception. In their looseness and speed, these paintings reject perfectionism, embracing the half-finished and the almost-right to affirm what is unambiguously alive.

A parallel thread runs through a dialogue she invited with veteran surf photographer John Witzig, whose 1960s images of Australian beach life captured countercultural ideals of freedom and ease. Young’s response is not nostalgic but gently subversive, a feminist reimagining of that mythology through a domestic lens. Where Witzig’s world is sun-bleached and male, hers is intimate and maternal, inhabited and self-aware. The beach shacks and sun-bleached bodies of Witzig’s photographs are reframed in Young’s paintings as interiors filled with lived reality: kitchens, gardens and the steady rhythm of ordinary days. His pictures are like pages from a surf manifesto, all salt and sunlight. Hers sustains that freedom within the domestic, turning repetition and responsibility into another form of flow. What unites them is a laissez-faire rhythm: one rides the wave; the other tends the shore.

At its core, Young’s practice is a conversation about attention. Painting from life becomes a way to resist distraction and reclaim time. While she chides her own so-called rules, her work insists on a sustained belief in the value of looking slowly and decisively. There is wonder in the everyday, and truth in the imperfect. In a post-truth age of speed and saturation, Young paints a quieter form of clarity, a domestic realism that finds fast freedom in staying still.

Daniel Mudie Cunningham - Director, Wollongong Art Gallery, NSW Australia

https://sophiegannongallery.com.au/exhibition/laissez-faire-the-witzig-archive/