Body as Site of Assembly

Work samples

Third Watch, 2025

Third Watch reimagines urban safety infrastructure through a visual language of protection grounded in care rather than surveillance. Installed in the bell towers at North and Maryland Avenues in Baltimore, illuminated sentinel figures draw from African sculptural traditions that honor fertility, continuity, and future promise.
Pulsing blue light emanates from within the translucent forms, transforming the city’s security lighting into a symbol of nurturing vigilance. Positioned along a historically significant corridor, the work offers a contemporary landmark that bridges spiritual watchfulness with civic presence.
Commissioned through Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Inviting Light initiative and curated by Derrick Adams, the project was realized and fabricated by Paradise Labs, located in Baltimore, MD.
PAUL RUSSELL ROAD

Paul Russell Road is a half-scale architectural structure that reflects on memory, inheritance, and the shifting meaning of home. Suspended between familiarity and disorientation, the house destabilizes spatial expectation and invites viewers to reconsider the psychological and historical weight embedded within domestic space. Drawing from personal and regional histories, the work positions architecture as both container and witness, asking how places hold presence even as landscapes transform.
Threshold

Spanning 70 by 25 feet, Threshold marks the space between two lost communities in Frisco, Texas. A sweeping flock of birds rises from densely layered vegetation, tracing the historical passage between the original settlement of Lebanon and Lolaville, a once-thriving Black farming community. Fabricated in mosaic by Franz Mayer of Munich, the work translates Charlton’s collage language to an architectural scale, activating the site while holding histories of displacement, migration, and preservation in dynamic tension.
Struldbrugs

In the Struldbrugs series, life-sized self-portraits are embedded directly into handmade paper as watermarks, visible only when held to light. Created in collaboration with master papermaker Nicole Donnelly, the figure becomes inseparable from the sheet itself—foundational yet not immediately legible. Positioned over sites of familial land, the work considers persistence, inheritance, and what it means to remain present even when rendered difficult to see. The body is not depicted on the surface; it is structurally held within it.

About Zoë

Zoë Charlton (Baltimore, MD) creates figure drawings, collages, installations, and animations that depict her subject’s relationship to culturally resonant objects and landscapes. Charlton received her MFA degree from the University of Texas at Austin and participated in residencies at Artpace (TX), McColl Center for Art + Innovation (NC), Ucross Foundation (WY), the Skowhegan School of Painting (ME), and the Patterson Residency at the Creative Alliance (MD).

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View Zoë's Resume

Third Watch

Third Watch reimagines urban safety infrastructure through a visual language of protection grounded in care rather than surveillance. Installed in the bell towers at North and Maryland Avenues in Baltimore, illuminated sentinel figures draw from African sculptural traditions that honor continuity and future promise. Pulsing blue light emanates from within the translucent forms, transforming the city’s security lighting into a symbol of vigilance and collective presence.

Third Watch, 2024. Cast resin, LED illumination. Station North Arts District, Baltimore

Illuminated resin figures installed within a historic bell tower at North and Maryland Avenues in Baltimore, reframing security lighting as a visual language of vigilance and collective care.
Third Watch, 2025. Installation view. Baltimore.

Glowing figure visible high inside a bell tower overlooking a city intersection at night.
Third Watch, 2025. Alternate view

Illuminated resin figure installed within a historic bell tower at North and Maryland Avenues in Baltimore

Struldbrugs

The Struldbrugs series features life-sized self-portraits embedded as watermarks within handmade paper, visible only when held to light. Referencing Swift’s immortal figures who persist despite systemic erasure, the works examine inheritance, land, and the conditions of visibility

Struldbrugs, 2022–present. Handmade paper with watermark.

Life-sized self-portrait embedded during paper formation, making the figure structurally inseparable from the sheet.
Struldbrugs:Inherent, 2025

Life-sized self-portrait embedded during paper formation, making the figure structurally inseparable from the sheet.

Declared and Proclaimed (The Black Settlers, Homecoming)

Declared and Proclaimed considers the layered history of Liberia through a central female figure stabilizing a fractured landscape. The work reflects on the complexities of Black migration, settlement, and autonomy, and the unfinished labor of liberation as it intersects land, architecture, and power.

Declared and Proclaimed (The Black Settlers, Homecoming)

Full view of the mural featuring a central figure bearing the weight of destabilized terrain.
Declared and Proclaimed (The Black Settlers, Homecoming)

Detail highlighting architecture and landforms.
Declared and Proclaimed (The Black Settlers, Homecoming)

Detail focusing on the masked figure as a stabilizing presence within the work.

Paul Russell Road

Paul Russell Road, 2018/2025

Paul Russell Road invites viewers to contemplate family, radical remembering, and the complexities of inheritance through Zoë Charlton’s re-creation of her grandmother’s Tallahassee home. Inverted and rendered at half-scale, Charlton reconstructed this familial homestead from memory, informed by storytelling and conversations with cousins as they made spatial considerations from the number of windows to porch placement. The tilted wooden structure opens to reveal an interior filled with neatly arranged, smaller-scale houses and bungalows that echo the traditional styles ubiquitous in suburban neighborhoods. Their uniform color and glittering roofs signal that viewers are engaging not with literal reality, but with layered, constructed memories.

The home belonged to Everlena Bates, a matriarch and domestic worker who fostered the gathering place for family and friends, where stories were shared. After Bates' passing, the homestead was sold and redeveloped into a suburban enclave, its legacy folded into a larger narrative of gentrification. The resulting ghostly structure operates as a record shaped through an accumulation of memory, where recollection and imagination accrete into critical fabulation.

Paul Russell Road

Inverted domestic structure disrupts spatial expectations and familiar orientation.
Paul Russell Road, 2018/2025

Paul Russell Road
2018/2025
Wood, Latex Paint, Building Hardware, Enamel, Glitter Lionel Train Houses,
Corrugated Metal
Approximately 14’ x 14’
First commissioned by Artpace San Antonio, Paul Russell Road invites viewers to contemplate family, radical remembering, and the complexities of inheritance through Zoë Charlton’s re-creation of her grandmother’s Tallahassee home. Inverted and rendered at half-scale, Charlton reconstructed this familial homestead from memory, informed by storytelling and conversations with cousins as they made spatial considerations from the number of windows to porch placement. The tilted wooden structure opens to reveal an interior filled with neatly arranged, smaller-scale houses and bungalows that echo the traditional styles ubiquitous in suburban neighborhoods. Their uniform color and glittering roofs signal that viewers are engaging not with literal reality, but with layered, constructed memories.
The home belonged to Everlena Bates, a matriarch and domestic worker who fostered the gathering place for family and friends, where stories were shared. After Bates' passing, the homestead was sold and redeveloped into a suburban enclave, its legacy folded into a larger narrative of gentrification. The resulting ghostly structure operates as a record shaped through an accumulation of memory, where recollection and imagination accrete into critical fabulation.

Rendition - Sibs

Rendition presents six repeated figurative forms that gather as a collective presence. The installation explores how repetition shifts the individual body toward a shared psychic and historical weight, holding together monument, witness, and persistence.

Rendition - Sibs, 2022

Grouped figures create a collective presence through repetition and stance.
The black and blue coloration speaks to bodies marked by systems that simultaneously categorize and individualize us. I deliberately named these works "renditions" to reference multiple meanings – artistic interpretation, legal extradition, and forcible transfer – connecting them to questions of how our bodies are controlled and moved across boundaries.
This exploration of how bodies are controlled, moved, and transformed naturally led me to consider communities that have been physically displaced yet persist in memory.
Rendition - Sibs, 2022

Grouped figures create a collective presence through repetition and stance.
The black and blue coloration speaks to bodies marked by systems that simultaneously categorize and individualize us. I deliberately named these works "renditions" to reference multiple meanings – artistic interpretation, legal extradition, and forcible transfer – connecting them to questions of how our bodies are controlled and moved across boundaries.
This exploration of how bodies are controlled, moved, and transformed naturally led me to consider communities that have been physically displaced yet persist in memory.

Compromise Series

Collage installations assemble images of landscape, architecture, objects, and the body into layered environments. Operating through accumulation and spatial composition, these works use collage as a method for building meaning from commercially sourced imagery and figure drawing while opening space between past and present.

Looking Hopefully For Life

Full installation view emphasizing scale and layered composition
A Bird For the Sportsmans Gun

Full installation view emphasizing scale and layered composition
Country A Wilderness Unsubdued

Full installation view emphasizing scale and layered composition
In Climate and Culture

Full installation view emphasizing scale and layered composition
My First Name is Hers

Full installation view emphasizing scale and layered composition
Meant for the Homebred

Full installation view emphasizing scale and layered composition

Immortal Series

Large-scale drawings position the figure as an active site of inscription.

Blue Swoosh (Immortal Series)

Large drawing of a seated figure consuming digital image of mask, wearing black sneakers with blue swoosh. Large-scale drawings position the figure as an active site of inscription. Layered marks and embedded imagery treat the body as both surface and archive
Flip Flops (Immortal Series)

Large drawing of a seated figure consuming digital image of mask, wearing blue flip-flops. Figure drawing combining graphite and painted elements, positioning the body as both subject and surface.
Striped Socks (Immortal Series)

Large drawing of a seated figure consuming digital image of mask, wearing multi-colored striped socks. Figure drawing combining graphite and painted elements, positioning the body as both subject and surface.