Zoë Rayne is an oil painter living and painting on the Traditional Lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, in the Dandenong Ranges of Victoria, Australia. She is currently studying a Bachelor of Environmental Science (Wildlife and Conservation Biology) at Deakin University and graduated from the National Art School in 2015 with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting.

​

Her meticulously hand painted oil paintings take 3 months to multiple years to complete and use symbols to depict personal myths and stories. With a deep connection to the more-than-human world, Zoë has always felt called to depict humanity’s inherent inseparability from nature and the magic that thrives from our entanglement with the natural world. A painter and inhabitant of the liminal, she strives to portray a sense of mystery and the chthonic in her work through the landscapes and colours she chooses to paint. As a highly sensitive, neurodivergent person, nature has always been a place of belonging and connection for the artist. As a lover of touch, this need for connection extends beyond the human and into the earth itself; to be fully erotically embedded into the ecosystem.

​

After suffering for over a decade with chronic pain from endometriosis/adenomyosis, being able to take back her autonomy and feel pain on her own terms can be an incredibly transformative and liberating practice for Zoë. Her art reflects an ongoing dance with pain, through her own body’s fortnightly decline, to a love for BDSM and kink, specifically rope bondage.

​

Zoë is incredibly inspired by folklore and myth, botany (specifically psychoactive plants), mycology, queer ecology, kink, and reconnecting with her European ancestral roots. Her paintings are a reclamation of old ways found in myth, story and folklore, intertwined with her own explorations of queerness, ritual, kink and eco-sexuality. Her work has been shown in the USA and galleries around Australia.