Series
Rose
The Rose series marks Maxted's return to painting and a new direction in her practice, moving between representation and abstraction to examine the construction of the female image in the contemporary world.
In an era shaped by photography, the digital, and synthetic images, Maxted returns to the self-portrait in the traditional medium of paint on canvas, playing on the allegory of lost identity through image reproduction.
Her current work comments on the digital climate, eroding her own image through the inevitable loss that comes with reproduction, printing, and circulation. Identity, signal, and color are lost and reclaimed in the same gesture.
Mood
An earlier body of work, painted entirely in acrylic, isolating the body in familiar acts: eating, winking, crying, holidaying.
Rooted in psychological pop art, painted in the saturated, filter-bright tones of contemporary digital images. Women are caught mid-gesture, mid-thought, mid-feeling, the gaze becoming central to the work rather than something staged for the viewer.
Red
At the intersection of the domestic and the performative, ordinary rituals become staged and heightened. Gestures of femininity are caught mid performance, and the gaze takes center stage. A rose recurs throughout, a motif that carries through her practice.
Painted during her own engagement, the Red series looks at domesticity as inheritance rather than choice, its rituals rendered in the bright, absurd language of surrealist pop. Tradition and performance share the same frame, staged in saturated, theatrical color.
Icon
Politicos
works.