Maxine Sutton

Bio

Maxine Sutton is a UK-based visual artist working at the intersection of textile processes and contemporary abstraction. She lives and works in Margate, Kent.

She studied at the Royal College Of Art and Ravensbourne College of Art. Her practice draws on a background in painting, textile processes, and material reuse. In 2008, she was selected for Reflect Forward, a research project at the Museum of the Home  (then known as The Geffrye Museum), which included a solo presentation at Craft Central, London.

Her work has been presented through exhibitions, projects, and commissions in the UK and internationally.

Statement

My work is informed by a background in painting and textile processes, and by a long-standing attention to reuse, material constraints and domestic making. My practice shifts around a meeting point of experiences with fabric and abstraction.

I make primarily wall-based objects, with reclaimed cloth and on paper. I use stitch and print techniques, appliqué and embroidery, to construct works that explore fragmentation, structure, and reassembly. Reuse functions in my practice as a working condition rather than a theme, as materials arrive with prior histories and qualities that shape the work’s development. Through rhythms of living and making, relationships emerge in the work, in which human systems and organic systems are entangled, interior spaces and landscape intersect and press into one another.

I work across wet and dry processes, between speed and slowness, intuition and formal decision making. Beginning with the excesses and resistance of materials, the work revisits and tests how form, colour, and surface hold tension between parts. 

I grasp at meanings sought through construction, rather than narrative resolution. Sometimes figuration appears alongside abstraction, where the body and objects enter the work as sites of pressure and navigation, rather than representation. 

CV