Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Maya McMahon-Boon
My work looks at the material exploration of my physical practice; how I map, layer and express the boundaries of my subject matter. Predominantly, my practice mostly consists of screenprints, and intaglio works; with my etching plates usually used on both sides to provide a spotlight on the marks made as an indirect result of other actions in the workshop. I realise my material process through a wide variety of technical and unconventional methods, which allows me the scope to play with ideas across many different visual languages. Within an iterative process, the scaffolding and uncontrolled marks allow for an interest in boundaries to take root. I aim to highlight the physicalness of the work I create by showcasing its material qualities. This allows me work to speak to the geometry of the organic while simultaneously walking a tightrope over total abstraction; the interdependent relationship I have with the more uncontrolled elements of my practice allows the linearity of my imagery to function as their own structures.
I like to think of my practice in multiple strands. Throughout my creative process, my bodies of work evolve through an undulating journey of repetition and trial-and-error while studying colour and form in the imagery. This playful experimentation in my work is then able to be regulated with geometric containers or digital image manipulation tools such as bitmapping. By having crossovers both technically and visually, I encourage the works to speak with each other in constant dialogue through forms, shape and subject matter.
‘Night Manager’ Series
The ‘Night Manager’ series is an ongoing series of etchings I started working on in May 2023. The imagery was all taken from various TV Series, the stills from which then became abstracted as they transformed through the physical making process. By using fictional imagery as a source, I felt the work was able to grow into it’s own being with a certain freedom- speaking to the digital landscape, the masking from the screen is a catalyst for revealing the abstract.