Sunday Series Artist Talks: Zoë Welsh

Throughout 2024 we’ll be hosting conversations between artist & curator, Judy Barie, Director of Galleries at The Chautauqua Institution, and a member from Pittsburgh’s creative community to discuss their work & practice.

We’re excited to welcome painter, Zoë Welsh to the conversation!

Judy Barie is a curator and painter with a long career supporting artists. She divides her time between Pittsburgh, PA and Chautauqua, NY, where she serves as the Susan and John Turben Director of the Chautauqua Visual Arts Galleries. At Chautauqua, she curates and directs a variety of contemporary exhibitions while inspiring collectors and supporting artists. Judy was also the curator of PCA&M’s 2023 Member and Student Exhibition. 

Zoë Welsh was born in Wilkinsburg, PA and received her BFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 2016. She currently works out of her studio at Radiant Hall Studios in Pittsburgh, PA.

Zoë creates mixed media paintings based on her interest of translating mental space into symbolic landscape. She works through an intuitive process that explores personal narrative as it represents journey, obstacle, time, and experience. Through inspiration and observation of the natural world, she transforms perceived space and complex emotion into felt landscape, allowing the formal elements to take on symbolic form.

Through a process of pasting strips of paper underneath layers of transparent color, the architecture of an intuitive image emerges, transforming the surface into a figurative and at times literal window, giving way to an environment that is felt beyond the edges of the canvas.