Maya Stocks

Artist Statement

Michel Serres describes the state of noise produced by the new technological terrain of dispersed knowledge—knowledge divorced from the senses—as a ‘mass of cloud.’ In the systemised, gridded and tabulated late capitalist reality, impact reigns over human connection and linear patriarchal extractions of knowledge dominate. Divorced from the senses, technocratic systems leave behind residues of dead, instrumentalised matter. The artist as collector, repurposes these fragments into personal, tactile and sacred objects through material processes and interventions.

The leitmotif of my recent PhD research was the mesh—an open system of lines, voids, and connections. It is a spatial system that allows air to pass through it, it has the capacity to both contain and disperse. Both my writing and my making have been mediated through this form. I have thought ‘through’ the mesh and its everyday occurences in hard and soft—from grids to fishing nets. The mesh is a surface that maps space in a particular way. The spaces between its intersections provide the potential for a ‘poeisis’ of new knowledge. Using foam, plaster, rubber bands and chicken wire, these works explore how the ‘hard’ industrial mesh operates on the ‘soft’ nebulous mass of chunks of discarded upholstery foam, where each tries to consume and engulf the other. These are simple everyday objects, casually made and arranged, in which form and formlessness try to coexist.