Aralia Maxwell is a visual artist from Waseca, Saskatchewan/Treaty 6 Territory, currently based in Montréal, Québec/Tiohtià:ke. She received a BA from the University of Saskatchewan in 2015 and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in 2019. Following graduation, she has worked as a sessional painting instructor at NSCAD University. Maxwell’s artwork, research, and writing has been featured in numerous galleries, publications, and other platforms across Canada. Her honours include a Governor General Academic Gold Medal, as well as continued support from SK Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Maxwell’s artistic practice explores evolutions in visual aesthetics. Blending and abstracting vocabularies of fine art, gastronomy, biology, and geology, she asks the observer to reconsider their relationships with consumerism and the material world. For this artwork, the act of making is as significant as the final appearance. Thick acrylic paint is mixed and applied to wooden supports using kitchen tools. With careful gestures, small dollops of paint accumulate in fractal patterns which grow over days, weeks, months and, in some cases, years. Maxwell’s process-driven paintings create space for meditations on time, labour, materiality, and transformation.

Her artwork is available at Galerie Robertson Arès.

—

instagram // @araliamaxwell