MAÏA

MAÏA is a multidisciplinary visual artist, recording artist, music producer and arts educator based in Brisbane, Australia.

Of mixed Calabrian and Coloured South African heritage, with Indigenous Khoisan roots, her practice is shaped by questions of ancestry, identity, diaspora and belonging. Growing up within a multicultural family, and later researching her family history and returning to South Africa, deepened an ongoing exploration of what we inherit, what becomes disconnected or transformed across generations, and what we choose to carry forward.

Working across visual art, sound and collaborative practice, MAÏA explores the relationships between memory, culture, place and identity, and the ways stories and knowledge continue to move through generations.

She is also the Founder and Creative Director of Present Ascendants.

Creative statement

My work begins with questions of identity.

What do we carry from the people who came before us? What becomes fragmented, forgotten or transformed across generations? How are we shaped by what came before us and the world we inhabit now? And what do we choose to remember, reconnect with and carry forward?

Growing up across cultures, I became interested in the spaces between belonging and disconnection, and in how identity is formed through family, ancestry, migration, place and memory.

My work in culturally diverse and First Nations arts education brought these questions closer. Working with young people around culture, identity and Country required me to locate myself within that work - to understand where I came from, what I carried, and where disconnection existed in my own story. Creating space for others to explore identity meant being willing to examine my own.

Researching my family history and returning to South Africa became part of that process. It deepened my understanding of my own lineage while revealing the gaps, movements and transformations within it.

Travel has shaped this thinking too. Spending time in places including Brazil and Papua New Guinea, and encountering living Indigenous cultures with longstanding relationships to land, ancestry, community and knowledge, made cultural continuity more tangible. These experiences brought me back to my own questions: what is retained, what changes, what is lost, and what can be found again?

My Ancestor Series emerged from this exploration. Through portraiture, I consider ancestry as something living rather than fixed - something that continues through the present while being interpreted and reshaped by each generation.

Across my broader practice, I work with image, sound, moving image and mixed media to explore identity, inheritance, memory, place and cultural continuity. I am interested in what remains present across generations, how we locate ourselves within what came before us, and how what we carry forward can shape what comes next.

Practice

MAÏA works across painting, printmaking, mixed media, moving image, sound and music production.

Her visual practice moves between portraiture, figurative and abstract forms, using drawing, painting, layered mark-making, print processes and mixed media. She works across both physical and digital processes, often combining materials and techniques as a work develops.

Sound and music form another part of her practice, extending her interest in memory, identity and storytelling through voice, rhythm, recording and production.

Across these forms, her practice is exploratory and multidisciplinary, allowing ideas to move between image, material, sound and space.