Last month we profiled href="http://www.woostercollective.com/2003_10_05_newsarchive.html#1065274480785
18791">Mine, who along with Aiko and Zoie, contribute to href="http://www.eatmorechickens.cjb.net">Eat More Chickens, a London based
collective.  Here’s an interview with Zoie, sent to us via email late last
week:

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Zoie - The Vitals:

Where do you now live?: London, England
How long
have you been creating street art?: I’ve been thinking about it for about
graffiti for 7 years, but really doing something concrete solidly for the last
two years.
What did you do last night? danced like i’ve never danced
before to funk/fusion riddims
What is your favourite thing to eat for
dinner? oh my god. Maybe bangers and mash. Maybe very very cheesy pizza. Maybe a
good old fashioned steak…?
Who is your favourite fictional character?:
Another tough one. Maybe Batman (EMC are like Batman x 3).
What do you
currently have in your pockets? A monthly travelcard. A mobile phone (cellphone
yo), 5 or 6 Zoie stickers (i started the day with 60), some gum.
If you
were given “more time,” what would you do with it? Oh my god, that would be
God’s fucken’ Gift. I’d put even more time into my writing and my art, I’d go
bombing all the time, I’d skate more.
Who do you love?: I love my girl. I
love Anticon.

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Zoie - The A’s to Our Q’s:

Wooster: How did you get started in
creating art for the street?

Zoie: I went to kind of
a ghettoed-out school where graf was basically an accessory, even more so than
the rest of the quasi-hiphop cliche package. Every other dude wrote graffiti in
some form or another, though it was mostly on the back cover of their
schoolbooks. Though there would be stories going round of ‘dude got busted in
yards and had to hide in the bushes for two hours etc’ and you never were sure
weather it was an urban myth or not.  But basically, I was surrounded with
graffiti, and it made me want to imitate it, which I did for years and got
laughed at hardcore most of the time. When I got really into music, I found art
everywhere, and with urban music comes urban art. Early issues of Graphotism
were the root of my real interest and eventually active involvement in street
art. Seeing an interview with Toasters in Graphotism#26 finally sealed the deal,
and I started making stickers.

Wooster: What other
street artists do you most admire and why?

Zoie: The
Toaster is what got me thinking about Graffiti in a completely different way. In
that Graphotism interview, the image I’d been seeing around the city for years
was finally put into context, and what really captivated me about it is its
anonymity and the lack of a commonplace logical explanation for its existence in
the city, other than to confuse and to subvert. I still think the Toaster is an
amazing image, just graphically speaking. It’s a badass logo and the more I see
it the more I love it. Half the reason I’m doing what I’m doing with such a
passion right now, is that Aiko and Mine were there at the beginning, and we
started doing this together. Those guys are an endless source of inspiration to
me. Nowadays, I’m also really loving the work of several people: NT crew, Spie
and Swoon. Spie, the London graf writer, for revolutionising the thow-up, for
stripping graffiti down to its basic shapes and then repeating them in that
brilliant soft cartoon style that made graffiti appealing to me in the first
place. A similar thing with Network Terror crew, who have been destroying trains
in England for a while now, and who have the craziest and most inventive crew-
wide aesthetic that I know of. They have no respect for traditional letterforms
or traditional visual rhythm. Or even straight lines. I love Swoon for her
collages and her unbelievable, fragile figures - both for their beautiful
appearance and her technical prowess: HOW does she get those things to stay in
one piece in transit? Her exploration of urban decay through her own work is
really interesting to me as well - it’s a theme I’ve been working on exploring
myself actually.

Wooster: What’s your favourite
city, neighbourhood, or block, to post and/or to see street art?

/>Zoie: I wish I had more time to skate these days, but when I
do my local spot is Stockwell Skate Park in Brixton, South London. It’s always
great to see good stuff down there. Nano used to have an amazing character on
the roll-in block. Sickboy, NT and myself have also left marks on that same
piece of skate-furniture. The walls are always cool as well. Other than that,
anywhere in this great city of ours is a good location. The East End of London,
namely the Shoreditch area, is getting destroyed all the time now due to the
amount of clubs and stuff down there - you can take a trip to Old Street and
just walk around and enjoy a look through a gallery of English and international
street art. This is amazing, but it’s also really cool to see street art in
unexpected places in the city.

Wooster: What
inspires you now?

Zoie: a lot of the music that I
love is based on collaged ideas and is slightly lo-fi and slightly haphazard,
but also has a clean, defined edge. This inspires me to make art that is both
these things. This is the reason that the streets are such a good location for
my clean and crisp graphics, and why spray paint is such a good freestyle medium
for painting.It’s easy to be ‘iconic’ with images that you place in the public
view (check out Aiko’s latest stencils for tongue-in-cheek pokes at ‘iconic’
imagery), but I like the idea of being subversive without being malicious. And
also I like to make references to films or music or whatever that has affected
me - I’m not too bothered about whether anybody else will relate.

/>Wooster: What are you currently working on?  Can you give us
a sneak peek?

Zoie: Right now, I’m working on
putting together some silly posters. I’ve dug up these books in my art school
library that are supposed to be like visual references for drawing people.
They’re made in the late 60s though, and that means they are a total goldmine
for image sampling! Myself, Aiko and Basik IBS are gonna do some postrin’ I
think. Another thing I’m fuckin’ with is trying to expand on the image of the
clitoris fairy. She’s become like my logo, an alternative to my tag, and her
image has never changed since I first started putting it up. But I’m working on
introducing her rustic face into more familiar contexts. We’ll see what comes of
that.

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