Maija Liepins

Maija’s art practice is something she strives to make ‘her every day’. Repetitive actions such as daily walks and dream journals or collecting visual impressions with her mobile phone generates material with which to reveal the subtle, ‘underneath’. This subtle realm of life is evoked through a sensitive attunement to environments, relational dynamics and her own inner experience. Combining digital media and live action is an important part of her process. Her art is sensory, often meditative, depicting emotional landscapes and inviting interactive encounters. Working in mixed-media, Maija’s Creativity In Motion series combines layers of dance and movement, poetry and utterances, with film and photographs creating links across time and geography.

www.thedreamforest.maija.co.uk

 

Follow this artist

CAS blog: author/maijaliepins
instagram: @maijaliepins
twitter: @LitlLinden
CAS shop: works for sale

 

Notes on my practice

I start by collecting impressions from dreams or my environment, with my camera and sketchbook. Impressions from direct experience are recorded in poetry. I start combining, blending, and layering these collected materials in an instinctive and intuitive way to emphasise the textures, moods, and colours. This exploratory phase is full of experimentation and surprises that remind me of the analogue photography process because the technology I’m using has its own style. So I sometimes feel like I am collaborating with the software!

Collaboration and mutual exchange is important to me, I am responding to my relationship with environments, people and material all the time. It’s a dialogue between us in which an exchange takes place and a phenomenon arises, we can call it art. In winter, mud takes prominence, in autumn the fiery coloured leaves, in summer the flowers and foliage of the trees and I become more playful, dancing and exploring live art possibilities in the warm breeze. My compositions and selections begin emerging around seasonal themes, I also use personas to represent the functions and expressions of the organic ‘natural’ world in which category I include the human experience.

I document my dreams, and actively explore the dreamlike world behind my eyelids which is a fertile place to discover thematic symbols with which to furnish my personas for live art and improvised performances. Through actively embodying the expressions I want to make visible, I am able to create a deeper dialogue between myself and archetypal forces of nature, and find my own language to express them in life.

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This artist has works for sale in the CAS shop