Came and Gone Before

Exhibition Preview: Wednesday 14 October 2026, 5:00pm-7:00pm

Location: Leeds Arts University, Vernon Street, Leeds LS2 8PH

Click here to book your place at the preview

This exhibition is available to view from 10:00am - 4:00pm Monday to Friday by appointment only for external visitors. Please email curatorial@leeds-art.ac.uk to make an appointment. Staff and students are not required to make an appointment.

'Came and Gone Before', leave time to settle.

Repeated journeys and routines act as checkpoints throughout the day yet are often left out of the sequence of recollection. Passed by and absentmindedly glanced at. Came and Gone Before brings focus to these moments and sites, inviting viewers to look closer and consider the shared qualities between these places and more conventional ‘third places’.

Through her painting practice, Zoe Maxwell pulls at the tether between place and memory, exploring the space that is created away from strict truth and fixed spaces. Her paintings depict shared public and domestic areas, commonplaces reconstructed.

Transitional spaces and passing places found both in urban settings and within the home are drawn into focus, encouraging the audience to dwell as if on a streetcorner, leaning within a doorway or waiting in line. Maxwell is informed by memory processes of encoding and retrieval, decontextualising scenes through the handling of paint and close cropping to bring a broader sense of familiarity.

Questioning how we recall places, and stretching the distance between memory and fact, these paintings sit between the possibilities of what was, what could have been and potentially what could be.

Zoe Maxwell is a Leeds based painter. After graduating in 2024 from Leeds Arts University, she was selected as Graduate resident at Serf, Leeds resulting in a duo show, Moments that may follow (2025). Working in Leeds she has shown work across West Yorkshire. Exhibitions include: In Parallel part of Situation Leeds (2025), Leeds summer show (2025, 2026), Our Past, Present and Future, South Square Centre (2025). Maxwell has also shown works in selected exhibitions across the UK, working with Hypha studios and the Manchester Open at Home Gallery, Manchester. Her most recent show and debut solo exhibition, Places Pulled was on view at Assembly House, Leeds in September 2026.