Maja Novak graduated from Fine Art at College for Art and Photography Ljubljana in Slovenia, Visual Communications at Faculty for Design (Slovenia), and is currently studying MA Fine Art at Leeds Arts University. She works as an artist at her studio in Assembly House Leeds, Yoga and Meditation teacher and a Painting teacher.
She is a Fine Artist, interested in exploring space, (organic) matter, nature, philosophy, metaphysics, and the human experience. Her practice consists of sculpture, painting, and interactive installations and is inspired by subtle fragments of everyday life, questions of existence, and our relationship towards it.
Maja creates situations that question our understanding of the world and makes us think and reconsider what we see, know and believe. Her work is a playful mixture of organic matter, experimental tactile making and stretching the limits of primal materials such as clay. She makes an assortment of vessels that go against their obvious qualities and functions. In this way, through her playful installations Maja sends both the vessels and the observer on an adventure to challenge what we know of identity, the aspired ‘perfect’ form into the imperfectly organic and mystical — where blemished and imperfect forms are honoured for their liveness, resonance to humanity, and the objects become transformed, reborn, lost and found again by the cycles of making, arranging, positioning and perceiving.
Simplicity, function, (dis)order, (extra)ordinary and being, are just some of the research driven questions behind her practice.
She describes her work as an invitation to simplicity, evoking (human) connection and cultivating presence through everyday objects and situations — these are sometimes very obvious and known, yet other times they are steeped in mysticism.
