Maia Beyrouti was born in Paris and grew up in the south of France, before moving to London as a teen in the 1990s. She studied Art at Chelsea, Conservation of Organic Materials at Camberwell College of Arts and Crafts, and Visual Communication LCC. With this eclectic background she nurtures a multi-disciplinary approach to her art, which includes drawing, text and ceramics.

At C14 she presents Pseudomorphia, a series of objects exploring the phenomena of collapse and accumulation through the lens of identity; where does one thing end and another begin? How is one entity created by many and vice versa? What are the collective narratives we tell using these phenomena and where can new narratives emerge?

Specimens stand as fixed symbols and the works here look at what is lost by doing so, and what can we gain by exploring the nebulous zone of the in-between, of the overlap, taking them away from this fixity in form and also with the use of materials that bridge the clay to glaze spectrum.

The work combines a mix of materials; various stones, pumice, quartz, found bricks, glaze, ceramic, and sand are combined, incorporating shards, test tiles and discards from previous projects. Her assemblages look towards interactions of materials and matter, natural forces and the dis/engagement of humans with them in order to hopefully find themselves somewhere in-between.

The pieces aim to be ‘both’ and ‘neither’, her methodology is one of additive negation; namely layering and combining dry materials, then steering them away from what they seem to become by consciously thinking “not this, not this”, moving away from a fixed idea until a satisfactory result emerges, before they are further transformedand fused in the heat of the kiln.

It is in this idea of different stratas of time and matter, found objects and organic material coalescing into a momentary alliance of form, that speaks to what has collapsed and what is being accumulated. This body of work looks at how states of absence and accumulation show up in the artist’s own psyche, how thoughts, like matter, always rush in to fill a void.