this is how it feels...

At last then, with great excitement, I am happy to announce that my online exhibition catalogue is live at this link: https://issuu.com/maggieo/docs/maggie-ayres-brochure-2019/ My huge thanks goes to my amazing husband who has really worked hard to bring it all together for me. It’s great to see my work brought together like this. There are quite a range of pieces to see with accompanying context in situ shots and detail images. I have also written a little bit about each one. I hope these give you a good sense of my paintings. And of course if you are interested in buying anything, then please get in touch. All my details are in the catalogue.

As I start again with a change of title and more regular postings, I thought it would be more than timely to catch up with where I left off. Oh how time does pass! "Box" became part of my solo exhibition, "Orchard", at Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries last year. I showed six large scale wall pieces and each was accompanied by an assemblage work (six boxes). I was thrilled at the way it all worked together. To create a kind of narrative stepping stone from my last post to now, I've decided to show images for each of these boxes. I am listing the pieces in the order they were shown in the exhibition. "nestling breath" "but she hadn't realised 'til much later what had been lost" "the conveyable burden" "creation and reduction" "for nervous and other diseases" "realising the Queen of Sheba's jewels"

Here you find me on the threshold of a whole new body of work that has been scratching at my bones for so long.  All the while I have fairly delved with some pioneer spirit into painting with melted beeswax, resin and oil paint, destroyed so many old pieces that no longer served me and played with rust printing on paper and fabric and stitched the same.  At the same time a growing pile of boxes in various states of vintage and disrepair has been occupying my studio. If you've ever visited me there and noticed, you might have considered the pile just another aspect of general studio storage clutter. Inquiries as to their meaning have usually been answered with mutterings of a new arcane project, in planning, but not actually doing it yet... I write copious notes, look at old photographs, make drawings, read and read and find references to ...well ...everything really. Somehow it all seems relevant. This work is the BIG thing that I feel I have been revving up to since I started...

Whether the next project is boxes, bowls or as yet half formed ideas for something yet unspoken, each requires a bit more imagining, free-form exploring, sketchbook developing and journal musing before I actually feel I am committed to a new body of work. In a way this is quite a novel way of working for me. Leaping in and seeing what happens is more my style in the studio but in the current spirit of change, I’ve been feeling the need to act like a “proper artist” and do a bit more exploratory preparation so I can at least pretend that I know what I am doing. I have started doing a bit of experimenting with encaustic monoprinting, using a makeshift system of baking sheet heated over an electric hotplate as my printing bed. Here I make marks with encaustic wax pigment bars melting unctuously directly on to the tray before laying down paper on top to make the print. It is a mesmerising and compulsive activity and indeed much paper and wax is used in just observing obsessively as the...

Now I'm launching myself off the precipice with hopeful intent - no free fall with terror this time. The studio awaits, seemingly also keen to get started on a new adventure... Where will I begin? I survey the space. Mmmm - there's a devilishly alluring gathering of rusty metal shards on the table. Some printing with them onto a variety of papers and cloth would be a fruitful use of time, I think. Ahhh - my attention is drawn to the group of encaustic bowls I was experimenting with. To make another would be a pleasing rhythmical activity, curved layers of paper and wax combining into a satisfying just right for cupping-in-the-hand structure. Ooh - but there is my collection of seen-better-days wooden boxes. Part of me can't wait to start transforming them into the still mysterious project I have named "Box". But not yet. Choice can be like change sometimes - excitingly attractive but potentially ever so scary too. What if I choose the wrong thi...

Clearing space is a much under glorified way of spending time. There is an obvious usefulness in the activity of course, creating tidy, uncluttered areas in which to work without the distraction of too much muddling stuff. But that’s expected. Almost without fail whilst a-sorting, I will find a vital mislaid scraping tool or fabulously marked paper fragment that might enhance the next piece I make. Fortuitous but not life changing. This time though, this super deep clean of my studio left me feeling elated. Unburdened. The act of destroying my work was not some frenzied attack of self-loathing. (I know too well when that is the deal.) This was mindful purpose. I had created these pieces. I discovered, explored and honed skills. I developed narratives, questioned and challenged myself. All that could not be destroyed just by the act of cutting up, by removing the work from being. It is not lost - I absorbed it all both good and bad. I made the commitment to progress ...

What does an artist do when unsold work starts to dominate the studio? If they were newer encaustic pieces then I might scrape the wax surface back and start again on the wooden panels. But this work predates all my encaustic explorations. Numerous highly textured canvasses, some bubble-wrapped, stacked under tables, racked against diminishing wall space and taking up shelves threaten to stifle and ensnare me by their very presence. Somehow they don’t even seem relevant to what I do now, so immersed I feel now with my encaustic work. Would I want to put them on show and say this is what I make? A craft knife rests on the edge of the table... I thought I had tidied my tools away. Just one then to see how it feels... I look down at the floor. It definitely needs sweeping again. A mound of torn, mangled canvas with wrangled staples and threads lies there. I carry three stretcher frames across the floor. I know someone who will use these. This is good and getting easier. ...

I would finish the piece I was working on then I would have a bit of a tidy up in readiness for all the new stuff I was planning to do. That was the plan. Space. I needed more space. The necessary clutter of work in progress is at once comforting and restrictive. I am oblivious as time passes and chaos creeps in like silken tendrils, first to caress reassuringly ( I am in my lovely studio, after all with my making treasures abounding), then to smother as I search with feverish frustration for that very particular paper, cloth or scraping tool amongst the mounting detritus of all that creative doing. So to do a bit of sorting and reorganising is refreshingly restorative. Open the windows, turn the music up loud. Time to breathe and get moving. Tables scraped and cleared. Tools cleaned and rehoused. Paints back in box. Painty rags pinned to wall for future possibilities. Papers, fibres and threads dealt into ordered bundles. Floor swept (stopping only occasionally to wo...

For the last couple of weeks I have mixed: beeswax damar resin chalk pastels India ink graphite powder carbon paper encaustic pigments silk fibres and yarn rusty metal shards torn cotton scrim paper fragments with heat from table top stove and blow torch with assorted natural hair paint brushes with various scraping, gouging and engraving devices with manipulative hands and a HUGE amount of wonder, excitement and fun This is what I made... All original pieces are 15cm x 15cm

I have been experimenting all week with my newest encaustic accoutrements and I have had such a good time! Melting, stirring, dipping, dripping, brushing, scraping, marking, embedding, rubbing, gouging. I have spent more time that was reasonably necessary smelling the beeswax and lifting still warm globules to mould with my fingers. Watching the bloom on the surface fade under the smoothing of my hand. Fusing the layers of wax to each other with my heat gun was fine when I was working on the little boards but when I progressed to the first bigger piece, I realised that I definitely needed something more powerful. I always knew I wanted a proper blow torch, although I think in my head I was confusing blow torch with flame thrower... There is a huge array of flaming tools out there! As I wended my confused way through the ranks of blow torches I worried over temperature degrees, weights, burning attachments, safety features and costs. All kinds of wild scenarios flashed befo...

I thought encaustic art was all about painting with a little electric iron and brightly coloured wax. That singular notion didn't offer enough for me to explore further with the result that a vast rich seam of gloriously sensual artistic activity passed me by for so long. I don't quite remember what led to the earth-moving moment when I looked again but I did and it did! I do remember I was left breathless when I saw work by artists such as Roberta Lee Woods and Alicia Tormey. I was enthralled and immediately set off on new travellings to unexpected and unconsidered places. There followed several weeks of gathering pieces of required paraphernalia including a little table-top stove, cradled boards, and surface thermometer. To these I added some tools I'd used for ceramics, along with carbon paper, pastels, graphite powder and India ink. My trusty heat gun would take on new fusing dimensions. I read books, looked at lots of images online and watched YouTube videos to...