Sternthal Books is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Thick Bleach & Euphemisms, an artist’s book created with Zoë Buckman, featuring texts by Hilarie M. Sheets, Melissa Mednicov, and Hettie Judah.
Spanning more than a decade of Buckman’s practice, the book brings together work from major bodies including Every Curve, Present Life, Let Her Rave, Heavy Rag, Nomi, Bloodwork, and Tended. Rather than organizing this material as a conventional chronological monograph, Thick Bleach & Euphemisms offers a more intimate and subjective encounter with the artist’s work—tracing the recurring images, materials, personal histories, and emotional undercurrents that move between her projects.
Buckman’s practice explores the complexities of femininity, desire, violence, grief, motherhood, and survival. Working across embroidery, textiles, sculpture, photography, ceramics, neon, and installation, she frequently brings materials associated with domesticity and women’s labour into contact with objects and symbols of aggression. Vintage lingerie is embroidered with lyrics by Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.; wedding dresses are cut apart and remade as boxing gloves; tea towels, handkerchiefs, and tablecloths become surfaces for intimate images, fragments of language, and recollections of the body.
These juxtapositions—between softness and force, vulnerability and resistance, pleasure and pain—are central to Buckman’s work. Her materials often carry histories of their own: inherited, found, worn, stained, or already marked by use. Through the slow, bodily process of hand embroidery, she transforms them into records of lived experience. Personal photographs, memories, family stories, and her own writing sit alongside broader questions about gendered violence, patriarchal language, illness, miscarriage, and the ways people continue to seek tenderness and joy in the wake of trauma.
Thick Bleach & Euphemisms moves through Buckman’s work associatively, allowing different periods and projects to speak to one another across time. Conceived as an artist’s book in its own right, it creates a layered portrait of a practice in which the political is inseparable from the personal—and where repair does not mean concealing damage, but making its traces visible.
