Bio
Maria Britton is an artist making abstract paintings, sculptures, and textile-based works with a focus on repurposing two everyday materials: bed sheets and newspaper. Her distinctive bodies of work touch on themes of memory, dreams, accumulation, labor, and value. Maria has participated in artist residencies through Lighthouse Works, Hambidge Center, Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, Petrified Forest National Park, and Vermont Studio Center. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, Lump Gallery, and Atlanta Contemporary, among others. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings. Maria earned her BFA from Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC, and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has written for Burnaway and The Coastal Post. From 2015-2020, she co-directed an experimental art gallery called LOG. Since 1999, Maria has worked around 50 odd jobs as a housecleaner, educator, stain and glaze dental technician, direct support professional, photo re-toucher, hospital artist-in-residence working directly with oncology patients, and more.
Artist Statement
My art includes painting, sculpture, and textile-based works called Draperies. In my distinctive bodies of work, I explore notions of femininity and feminism, high and low forms of making, and dreams and disasters. Through my use of everyday materials including used bed sheets and newspapers, I transform materials typically on their way out the door into an opportunity to elevate and extend experiences of liminality. Accumulation is integral to my process and partly what my work is about. Dated bed sheets act as windows for peering into specific times from the past. The surface of a bed is a place where one both experiences and escapes reality, a gateway between two realms. My approach to making is improvisational within the constraints I define. I want to strike a balance between chaotic gestures and structure. I’m interested in exploring psychological themes through abstraction. Feminism informs and supports how I make and the materials and techniques I choose to work with. My paper pulp sculptures, made from newspapers and miscellaneous papers, are carefully constructed to combine floral forms with loose interpretations of bodily movements. Working with my own mix of pulped-up papers refers to the newsfeed and information overload. Influenced by clothing construction, the human body, curtains, windows, and cycles in nature, my work is a material exploration of the immaterial.
