Maggie Ayres

Maggie Ayres, visual art, painter

I look up at the sky and breathe. I feel the earth under my feet and feel connected…

My earliest memories are of looking up at the big sky over the Solway where we lived, playing in the fields of my grandparents’ smallholding nearby.

Summer days seemed unending with smells of hazy hayfield and saltwater carried in the air.

I’ve lived in several places since then but returning to Dumfries and Galloway in 2005 was at once a new beginning and a coming home. At last, I felt able to explore a creative path in a much more focused way and there were opportunities to become part of a rich and broad artistic community.

I have always been much more drawn to abstract expression in my creative practice rather than to the representational.

Looking at one of my pieces you might catch the hint of a bird’s wing, a stormy sky or rolling hills. These are the lines that I am drawn to. Undoubtedly the natural world does inform my work. In curves and shadows, I find hidden worlds. Here I sense a connection to the unseen where the imagination can wander and explore, from the tiniest cell form to the infinite universe.

I am driven by the desire to make visual an impossibly unseen concept like the displacement of air beneath a bird’s wings into a human breath. Indeed, how would such unseen concepts taste, smell, feel, look and sound?

At the same time, it’s important that I set all this in a sociopolitical context chiefly around the inclusivity of common humanity.

I focus on my ongoing exploratory sketchbooks to make abstract paintings, currently mainly using oils and cold wax medium on wood panels. Each piece is multi-layered as I build up texture and light to express my thoughts, memories and ideas.

I use various techniques including monoprinting, layering and abrading the surface to reveal the paint below.

It is a continual process of building up paint and then scratching away until it feels close to what I want to communicate.

For the last three years I have been developing new paintings based around themes of breath and sharing space.

A self-directed residency at WWT Caerlaverock on the Solway in November 2019 allowed me to consolidate these themes of shared sky, migration and the political nature of boundaries.

This work culminates in a solo show, “breath”, at Farfield Mill, Sedbergh near Kendal commencing on the 9th March until 15th May this year.

I will also be taking part in Spring Fling in June.