The organiser says:
ART JERICHO will present photographs by MAISIE MAUD BROADHEAD, a young London artist, in a mini retrospective of her work from the past four years, to include her new series of portraits 2014. Last year Maisie Broadhead was awarded the Jerwood Makers Open, and earlier this year she has been awarded the Brighton Pavillion Commission.
Broadhead's work has evolved through narrative. She studied Wood, Metal, Ceramics and Plastics at the University of Brighton, following a Foundation at Middlesex, and thereafter she completed an MA in Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery at the Royal College of Art where she now teaches. Objects that she made, such as glass cushions and jewellery, became her muses for photographic work that she staged around them. Her love of finely crafted artisan workmanship and detail is core to her work.
Broadhead's Women 2014, are inspired by the paintings of Johannes Vermeer. They are intimate portraits of women, lost in quiet moments, set within domestic context. Broadhead uses the three generations of women in her immediate family to augment the sense of intimacy. Her photographs have a painterly quality – a softness and feeling of time spent, that is so very much at odds with the function of digital photography and the pace of modern life. The quietness and solitude that she captures in her work is strongly contrasted with the materialism and technology that she laces into her compositions. At first glance in this series, we read distinct echoes of Vermeer, and then she catches us off guard as we discover the accoutrements of modern living casually laced into her compositions.
Broadhead stages her photographs with exquisite precision and attention to detail. She recalls the beauty of Dutch Old Masters through her styling and theatre, and the simple detail in the clothing and fabrics. Her characters are decidedly 21st century, but the mood and sensibility, despite the ‘advancement' of modernity are timeless in the shared concerns and role of women in domestic pursuits that remain unchanged.
A second series based on the paintings of Wilhelm Hammershoi will also be shown together with earlier work from the Jerwood series that secured Maisie Maud Broadhead the Jerwood Makers Open in 2013.