Zoë Greenham is a San Francisco-based artist originally born in Sydney, Australia. Her practice investigates geological, industrial, and economic infrastructures. Her paintings draw on the visual language of strata, seams, and cross-sections to reimagine surface and subsurface as interconnected systems of extraction, flow, and value. Controlled color fields, metallic accents, and layered compositions create an experience that is both seductive and unsettling, balancing order with rupture. By aestheticizing what is often hidden—pipelines, aquifers, veins of resource—these works consider how beauty can camouflage damage, and how industrial processes reshape not only land but perception.

Her sculptures extend these investigations into three dimensions, translating invisible systems into tactile encounters. Working with plaster, wood, and metal alongside soil, sand, and rock, these forms oscillate between earthworks and architectural models. Grounded yet precarious, industrial yet organic, these objects stage collisions between natural and fabricated matter. They probe how cycles of resource movement inscribe themselves into built and geological environments, asking viewers to reconsider the material and perceptual consequences of extraction.

Together, the paintings and sculptures map a cycle that moves between what lies beneath the earth and what rises above it. The paintings foreground extraction and rupture, while the sculptures embody the infrastructures that extend from those processes. Both rely on a shared language of layering, channeling, and flow, where geological formations and industrial systems mirror one another. By shifting between hidden depths and constructed surfaces, the work examines how resource extraction and infrastructure are co-constitutive, and how the aesthetics of order and function obscure cycles of exploitation.

She received her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has held faculty appointments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Harold Washington College, and Truman College. In 2022, she was awarded the Outstanding Teaching & Dedication Award from Wilbur Wright College. She has received research and travel grants from the University of Chicago and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Connecticut, Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Germany. She currently teaches at Los Medanos College.