In Conversation is a companion series to In This Body the Podcast, offering shorter, slower moments drawn from the wider well of dialogue. These are distilled encounters with thinkers and feelers whose work lives at the intersection of embodiment, sexuality, creativity, and spirit. Each episode invites you into a more intimate pace—thirty minutes of attunement, reflection, and quiet inquiry into the ways the body remembers, responds, and reclaims. Paired with gentle journal prompts, these offerings are an invitation to not just listen, but to feel what stirs within your very own body.
Zoë Pawlak
Zoë Pawlak is a Canadian contemporary artist, writer, and speaker whose work explores embodiment, longing, and the emotional texture of lived experience. With an 18-year painting career spanning both figurative and abstract forms, Zoe’s art lives in private and public collections around the world. Her practice, which integrates sensuality, spirituality, and personal narrative, invites viewers into an intimate dialogue with desire, grief, and becoming. Beyond the studio, Zoe is a creative mentor, Substack writer, and passionate advocate for sobriety, motherhood, and radical self-expression.
You can find out more about Zoë here.
The Conversation
This episode is an ode to the quiet resilience of creativity. A conversation about longing and liberation, artistry and addiction, and what it means to return to yourself through colour, body, and brushstroke. Zoë speaks candidly about sobriety as a gateway to embodiment, and the myth of the suffering artist as something she’s worked to unlearn. Together, Zoë and Ailey trace the emotional terrain of making art while living a life—full of tension, tenderness, and quiet rebellion. They reflect on what it means to express honestly in a world that often demands we shrink. At its core, this is a conversation about presence. About how we come back to the body—not just to feel, but to create.
Highlights
04:11 — Sobriety as the turning point in Zoe’s relationship to her body
07:26 — Creativity as rebellion, and reclaiming vitality through self-expression
12:25 — On losing the fire of creativity and finding your way back
17:36 — The tension between commerce and creativity
23:11 — Building embodiment through community and shared practices
Embody the Material
Questions to sit with:
What myths have you internalised about creativity, productivity, or worth?
When do you feel most alive in your body?
In what ways has your creative fire dimmed—and how might you begin to tend to it again?
If your art (or self-expression) didn’t need to be monetised, what would you create just for you?
How can you make one small act of rebellion today that brings you closer to yourself?
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