Maya Campbell Todd

Maya Todd (b. 2000, Belfast) is an MFA candidate at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Working across image, text and craft, often through obsolete digital technologies, her practice considers the body as a porous site through which memory and desire circulate. Todd is interested in things that leak: sweat, milk, language and tears. The tear is particularly generative within her work, carrying a double meaning: something shed and something ruptured. Her practice begins within this slippage, where distinctions between interior and exterior, self and other, body and world become unstable. Approaching tears as active matter rather than symbols, Todd attends to the traces they leave behind. Textiles, paper, hair, skin, food waste and domestic objects become absorptive surfaces that hold evidence of emotional and physical encounters. Through knitting, weaving and surface manipulation, affect is worked into material over time. Recent works centre on nude portraits of women met through dating applications and invited to cry before the camera. These encounters examine queer relations of looking, troubling distinctions between intimacy and extraction, vulnerability and performance, care and control. Todd is a recipient of an Erna Plachte Scholarship and, with fellow MFA student Fatima Butt, the Ruskin Research Fund for their ongoing project, public(k) knowledge.

Personal website.