STATEMENT:

The Struldbrugs series takes its title from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels of immortals who, upon reaching the age of 80, are declared legally dead, stripped of property and autonomy, and forced to live on at the discretion of the state. Through this speculative frame, Zoë Charlton explores what it means to persist while being systemically rendered invisible—how some bodies and lives are treated as foundational yet disposable within American systems.
The work requires close looking. When backlit, the watermark emerges slowly. This is the second piece in a planned four-part series. Each work features a life-sized self-portrait rendered as a watermark, embedded during the formation of the paper through variations in fiber density. The figure is inseparable from the sheet’s material integrity, visible only when held to light.
In Struldbrugs: Inherent, the figure holds the artist’s parents’ home, extending inquiry into inheritance, displacement, and the layered weight of familial land. In each work of the series, symbolic structures are sites of memory and persistence, even in the face of erasure.

This piece forms part of a series, created in collaboration with master papermaker Nicole Donnelly, first at the Brodsky Center at PAFA in 2022 and later at the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory and Educational Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio. Charlton works with Donnelly for her technical mastery and for her sensitivity to how paper itself can carry memory, labor, and form, all qualities central to the conceptual weight of the series.​​

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