Chaoskampf
Location: Suffolk, United Kingdom
Creative styling consultant: Tracy Nors
Photographer: Jesper Nors
Chaoskampf
This is the home of Zoe rubens, a Sculptor and Printmaker.
Zoe uses her considerable talent to combine figurative and conceptual Art, to produce intruiging works of Art, from ferrous and non-ferrous metals, which are cast, welded and etched. Her home is a showcase for many of her works, which sit along side many other visual treasures, collected by Zoe over many years. The effect is visually exciting and unique.
Casual and comfortable
Zoe lives in a quiet street in Ipswich. A Victorian house, it retains many lovely period features like fire surrounds, cornicing and lovely old wooden panelled doors.
The house has a casual, lived in feel which makes you feel instantly comfortable, and looking around, there is a lot to get excited about, such as the beautiful handmade light in the dining room.
Made by Zoe in her own individual style, this amazing construction consists of many pieces of rusted metal, which combine wonderfully, to create this three dimensional beauty.
Recycled and re-used
This home is evidence of recycled and re-used at its very best, from the kitchen cabinets to the coat stand, old materials have been re-invented and re-used to produce something useful as well as attractive. As Zoe said to me 'You have to use what you have' and this approach is exactly what creates the unexpected delights in her home.
For example, a hole in the floor has been cleverly utilised to make an umbrella stand. A lovely doll torso has been used as a useful and attractive bottle stopper.
Zoe is a real character, passionate and poetic, a real collector of vintage things. Unable to discard something lovely or useful, the walls and floors are crammed with an array of interesting and beautiful objects, pictures and collections.
Everywhere you look, there is something different, from the clouds painted on the kitchen ceiling to the glass constructions hanging in the window.
The human condition
In most of the rooms there are several of Zoe's sculptures, treasured keepers or those that are finished and passing through on-route to a London Gallery. Her work endeavours to express the human condition, emotions, and responses to environmental and social pressures of society.
I watch her working on a huge figurative piece in her studio at the bottom of the garden. She tells me, 'people make their own prisons.' This is what she is trying to comment on and capture in her piece.
This studio is the most useful 'shed' construction I have seen. It houses masses of metals and waste items just waiting for Zoe to turn them into Art.
Here, she welds, solders and casts her pieces, embodying them with subtle and complex narratives, which draw us in to her world and keep us wanted to revisit her work again and again.