artist statement

Danica Maier’s work deploys and subverts repetitive pattern, thereby the comfortable meets the uncomfortable. A soothing and familiar repeat is overlaid by contradictory imagery that is in conflict with the expectation of the medium. Sexual, pornographic imagery and slang bring what is expected to be mere decoration into question.

The work relies on an unusually direct relationship with the viewer, one that is articulated through a variety of means: Lace ribbon is used to create large wall ‘drawing’ installations. Meticulously embroidered dot matrix images are produced on canvas. Colour pencil floral word patterns cover the surface of large Mylar sheets. Initially, the work appears pretty and decorative, yet once the viewer begins to experience the work from various distances within the space the imagery reveals its true self.

Making up the complex rhythmic lace structures of the large wall installations are many repeated anamorphic line drawings of sexual antics. These representations are only clearly perceived as the viewer sees the work from particular angles and distances. Maier’s embroidered dot matrix’s images are taken from pornography. Up close the viewer sees only the elaborate surface texture of labour intensive embroidered knots, only when they move away from the work is the image understood. The colour pencil floral drawings work in the opposite way, creating an apparently empty decorative pattern from a distance. Only as the viewer goes in for a closer look, do they understand that the decorative structure is created from repeated slang words for female genitalia.

Maier’s practice employs craft based techniques normally used to decorate and adorn but not to comment. This is where the work bridges the gap between craft to art. Maier is corrupting the security of craft, object and technique by making something that is ostensibly benign have the ability to confound your expectations in a potentially shocking way. The conflict is symptomatic of the fact that in some ways Maier hankers after the idealized lifestyle of a fifties housewife baking cakes, cooking roast dinners, knitting socks and embroidering.

Within Maier’s act of creation is an ideal of tradition and family. It is borne out of nostalgia for a time and for family values that her parents tried to recreate, but could only simulate: a past that never existed or if it did, can never be recreated. In the mere act of trying to recreate it, a simulation of the ideal is formed. Re-contextualizing against the ‘ideal’ is Maier’s way of making it ‘more real’ - giving it substance and life. She is rebelling and subverting the ideal of a fifties American housewife to make it seem real, as this is the only way she can have it inhabit the values contemporaneously.