Maxine Bristow MRSS

They are materials that constitute the material culture of our built environment, silently form the backdrop to our mundane actions, and are manufactured into the everyday functioning objects through which we invisibly mediate our relationship with the world.

Drawing reference from interior design and the aesthetic staging of the everyday through visual merchandising and retail display, most recent work takes the form of a constellatory quasi-catalogue of interchangeable ‘thingly’ sculptural components, which are conceived in a way that can be configured and reconfigured within a series of formally staged mises-en-scène.

Offering the opportunity for continual rearrangement, the physical form of the work remains essentially mutable. Meaning similarly remains mutable, mobilised through the various connections and temporary coalitions that are set in play across the different elements, the installational context, and the productive indeterminacy of the subject’s sensuously bound experiential encounter. Prompting a host of contradictory somatic and semantic resonances, the intention is to return authority to the aesthetic impulse in a way that invites interpretation yet at the same time resists conceptual synthesis.

With a background in textiles, my early practice and research drew on the everyday functioning environment, modernist legacies and postmodern discourses with which the medium is implicated. In particular, harnessing the processes, materials and accompanying contexts of needlework/plain-sewing within the conventions of a minimalist aesthetic and the discourses of modernist autonomy.

I gained a BA (Hons) Fashion and Textiles (Embroidery) from Manchester Polytechnic in 1984, an MA Textiles 1985, and a practice based PhD from University of the Arts London/Norwich University of the Arts in 2016. Having taught Fine Art all of my career, I am currently Associate Professor/Programme Leader MA Fine at the University of Chester. I have exhibited nationally and internationally with work represented in the permanent collections of the Crafts Council, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery (purchased by the Contemporary Art Society Special Collection Scheme with funds from the Arts Council Lottery 2004).