Extensive training in the mounting of traditional scrolls motivated a search for truly individual expression. Maio sought mastery of the Japanese screen.
Her work remains true to the traditional function of the folding screen and recreates some lost techniques - double-sided hinges and reverse-sided decoration.
Maio brings to the canvas of the folding screen mundane materials - aluminium foil, crushed stone, sand, dirt, iron rust, antique kimono fabric, old washi documents - that provide a freedom of colour and texture unimaginable in traditional work.
Expressions of the fleeting, transient nature of life, her pieces are both painting and object, decorative and functional – a bewitchingly ambivalent form.
The artist’s creative development of different sized panels enables a flexibility of form and transformation of physical space that transcends the original intention and elevates her work to contemporary installation art.
As functional and installation art, Maio's works give unprecedented flexibility to the transformation of space and to the playful creative instincts of the owner of the work.
As sculptural objects her works stand in a variety of formations, none of which hint to its other manifestations.
Maio’s artistic concept embodies the contradictions and harmonies of Yin and Yang and their manifestation in human experience.
Confronting and exploring the universality of human experience she is unafraid to express the negative, the dark, the decay and transience of life. By juxtaposing it with the positive, light and fecund, her works not only create a seductive aesthetic but reach out to the psyche with powerful, visceral impacts.
I place ‘now’ on the everchanging canvas of the screen, transforming mundane everyday space into the exotic.
I use traditional Japanese techniques in the manufacture of the screen, but I draw on a variety of materials and my own emotions and creativity for the surface expression and I make them something that relates to the contemporary world in which I live.
