My work centers around a notion of nostalgia which is not so much a longing to return to whatever came before as much as it is a desperate desire to be “out of time and space”. I have found while making that there is a certain similarity between doing something over and over again and the process of remembering. The repetition of a stitch, or a fold, or a mark made, mimics the cyclical process of remembering, but also stands as physical evidence of time that has passed. This is important because when faced with the fickleness and subjectivity of memory, I am forced to ask if I can trust my own account of the past. In a way, I make it a means to record my existence. My work becomes a secondary memory and tries to document times that have passed. While the final works are probably as, if not more, distorted and unreliable as the memories they are informed by– at least they stand as physical proof of time. Artifacts of remembering; remnants.
Maia Lehr-Sacks graduated with a BA in Visual Arts (Fine Art) from Stellenbosch University (cum laude) in 2019. Lehr-Sacks has exhibited her artworks on numerous exhibitions both national and international. The most notable achievements in the past few years include an installation of eighty paper sculptures exhibited on the group show The Space Between (2016) at The South African Jewish Museum, having an artwork selected as one of the New signatures top 100 (2018), and participating for two years in a row in the Tankwa Artscape Residency (2018 and 2019) at Stonehenge Private Reserve in the Karoo. Documentation of the works created on the 2019 residency was exhibited on Contemporary Nature, an exhibition in Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania.
