Maude Maris describes her subjects as an architecture of emotion. She uses found fragments to reflect on the relationship between things, exploring stability and precariousness in an attempt to understand the seemingly random or chaotic. While her paintings are two-dimensional, they are clearly influenced by sculpture in both their production and their formal visual properties.
Maris begins by making casts of small found objects, ranging from dolls and statuettes to branches and fossils. These reproductions are then grouped into families. She arranges these families to create a mise en scène, which she then photographs. She then paints this image, increasing its scale over 10 times, while also manipulating the object's surfaces, shadows, colours and depth so that the outcome is almost unrecognisable from the original model. Through the smooth perfection of its surfaces and the absence of symbolic content, Maris' paintings exist in silent and splendid detachment from the assembled objects which they depict.
The creative process is conceived of here as a series of filters, which serve to create distance between the original objects and the final painting, and act in a manner analogous to - although quite different from - the mapping and modelling carried out by computer graphics systems.
