Background
“Maggie James is concerned with the fragmented nature of our experience of moving through our surroundings. She develops her own form of notation to represent these experiences through drawing”
Everything is always moving in the landscape. Fragments of the past co-exist with glimpses of the future. Walking or driving, the landscape is scanned - looked at carefully, with the eyes or with a device - observed, checked in mirrors.
The landscape become a metaphysical space, full of signs and abbreviations, indications of scale, repetition of forms, rhythms and surfaces.
Key influences in the last 15 years are
visiting Hangzhou and Shanghai
WG Sebald’s book ‘Rings of Saturn’
an exhibition called ‘British Vision’ seen in Ghent
Open Books, an international artists collaboration est. Wales 2012, exploring folding book forms
Recent work has taken the form of paintings, drawings and folding books made in relation to random journeys.
“both a record of an event and an introspection: a journey…that explores geography and psycho-geography, landscape and culture.”