Maya Irving

Blindfolded, embodied mark-making anchors my art practice. All art is intuitive, yet I have found this method more directly channels and celebrates my own intuition-as patternmaker; as energy; as refuge; as healer. If my art constitutes part of an attempt to process trauma, it rests on the belief that intuition holds intelligence and compassion beyond the conscious mind and the doubt and threat that stalk it. When I paint, I perform this return to intuition-to the insight that no force, however determined, can strip the body of its wisdom.

I have been working to accept that an assault I experienced was a violation, not an invitation. This work, however, has proved an invitation in itself: a catalyst for considering ways of knowing that extend into the body, and from the body into bodies as inter-generational trauma. My family has long harboured the shadow of historical sexual violence. Suffering my own wrong has forced me to reckon with that shadow-its shape and its potency, and its potential to cast itself into the future through bodies like mine.

Where we say inter-generational trauma, other societies say curse, from the Latin cursus: course. A forward progression. A course of action. The course of history. My art, whatever else it does, enacts a changing course. A lifting curse. With this exhibition, I hope that the meeting of movement, painting, and language evokes the vulnerability and resilience and curiosity of my effort. Each brush stroke an emotion nurtured as it arises, given space enough to be held separately and in concert. Breakdowns, breakthroughs, but also, and more crucially, breaks with.

'Our lives feed our art by making it real and authentic,' writes Daria Halpin, 'and our art opens and reflects back to us images of who we have been, who we are and who we might become.' For me, what holds and hones this gaze is intuition, which sees richness that the eyes can only imagine.

- Maya Irving & Anders Villani