Welcome back to the Student Spotlight! This is where we showcase a student within our LAU community and find out more about your practice. For this week's student spotlight, we hear from Chloe Maybury who is a Fine Art student. Chloe tells us what inspires her, what music she listens to whilst working and, what mindset helps her produce her best work.
SU: What work do you produce?
Chloe Maybury: I take an intuitive interdisciplinary approach to making work. I unveil my inner world through performance, sounds, delicate drawings and paintings, poetry, and soft sculpture.
SU: Who and what inspires you?
Chloe Maybury: I am always inspired by the natural world, more specifically the movements of underwater life and the mycelium. I also love artists who work with immersive installations such as Heather Phillipson, and Pipilotti Rist.
SU: What message do you want your work to convey if any? / When do you feel like you're at your most creative? / What's your working process?
Chloe Maybury: I consider myself both an artist and a witch, terms I believe are interchangeable due to the symbiotic relationship between art and magic. I have recently begun to explore how exhibitions and performance spaces can become ‘spellgrounds’ - energetically enchanted environments where spells can take place. My creative process is very similar to that of creating a ritual, calling upon my different interests just as I’d call upon the elements to raise and release energy.
SU: What do you listen to whilst working?
Chloe Maybury: I performed one of my dance spells live recently and halfway through, rain started falling heavily on the roof of the building. The ritualistic energy of the work left people telling me that I had summoned the rain. Whether I had or not remains unknown, but being able to open up peoples’ minds to this being a real possibility felt very special. I seek to reawaken that sense of wonder that most of us seem to lose after leaving childhood behind. I hope my work can create a portal into a new blue world that can allow people to escape from our harsh, fast paced world, even for just a moment.
SU: What mindset produces your best work?
Chloe Maybury: My work is aligned closely with my spiritual path and my personal healing, so following my intuition always helps me to find where I’m meant to be. I try to think about everything I’m creating through a gentle mind, trying to replace my judgment with curiosity. Treating each fragment of my work as though it is a living, growing creature is the best way to develop this world I am creating.
If you want to see more of Chloe's work, you can visit their portfolio here!