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 on occasion served as a sessional painting instructor at NSCAD University. Her work has exhibited nationally at venues which include Neutral Ground (Regina, SK), University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, MB), Galerie Art Mûr (Montréal, QC), Galerie Robertson Arès (Montréal, QC), and Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax, NS). Maxwell’s writing and research have been published by BlackFlash Magazine, SNAPline Magazine, and The Colour Research Society of 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 sculptural paintings explore evolutions in visual aesthetics. Blending and abstracting vocabularies of fine art, geometry, gastronomy, geology, and biology, 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 in Montréal, QC at Galerie Robertson Arès.