Maria Bird
Maria Bird
Vanity screen (2020) Oil paint on plywood, velvet, brass hinges and dainty feet. A vanity screen uses Ezekiel and the Valley of the Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14) to invoke the queer metamorphises needed to resist capitalist co-optation and commodification.
Queer Sci-Fi Landscape 1 (2020) Sculptural painting and woodcut. Oil paint on pine floorboard.
Red shift 6 Queer sci-fi landscape of abstracted forms that use colour to disquiet and disorient.
Red Hips (2020) Sculptural painting and woodcut. Oil paint on pine floorboard.
Bone Journey A series of 8 hardground etchings based on a short science fiction story written in response to Red Hips.
Bone Crossing (2021) Short-form fantasy in set in the landscape of Red Hips (2020), oil paint on wood.
Synopsis
Having exasperated the Pantheon and thoroughly menaced the population, the Goddess is, at last, punished. She is wrent. Bones flung to the farthest ends of the planet burying fathoms deep. Unrepentant, the Goddess activates her osseous matter with a powerful magnetic pull. Her spirit reaches out from each bone, drawing together a clan of reluctant pilgrims to extract and shepherd her parts across the long and perilous journey to Castle Dubrune, where she will reanimate. From here she will exact a commensurate revenge. Not content with the coercive nature and inconvenience of this irresistible voyage, she places a puerile curse on each bone. We follow the trials of six unfortunate pilgrims as they attempt the journey whilst battling their curses: a thieving hand, a kicking foot, a back that will not straighten, an insatiable horn, a sleepwalker that cannot wake and a laugh that will not cease. Not to be outwitted, the Pantheon of Gods have their own plans for the piecemeal Goddess in transit.
Maria is an executive assistant at a fortune 500 firm based in London. As an anti-capitalist feminist anarcho queer Maria’s artwork explores states of compromise, irony, acts of petty resistance and transformation. Maria is currently working in oil paint on wood, combining landscape, surrealism and abstraction into her own symbolic register.