At the Press! [Photographer: Annie Harvey]Photo of Artist [Photographer: Annie Harvey]Maaike Schipper is a printmaker and interdisciplinary artist from rural New South Wales, currently based in Melbourne. Guided by feminist frameworks of care, her practice embraces the slow, imperfect, and attentive nature of making; valuing process as a site of tenderness, reflection, and resistance. This approach is deeply rooted in ideologies that challenge the art world’s preoccupation with mastery, spectacle, and productivity, instead valuing repetition, patience, and imperfection as radical gestures of care.
Maaike’s current work situates sewing techniques and embroidery within the expanded field of printmaking, aligning thread with line and stitch with mark-making. Her work speaks to the duality of self; the unseen threads of memory and experience that build identity, and the visible layers of fabric and form that hold them. Just as the knotted underside of embroidery reveals the beauty of unseen labour, so too does each individual’s accumulation of struggle, success, and internal experience. By celebrating the tangled, complex, and nuanced, her work honours the beauty of process, the bravery of play, and the enduring curiosity of the inner child.
Safety Glasses, Ear Muffs, Acid Proof Gloves, Enclosed Leather Shoes. [Photographer: Annie Harvey]I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that I presently live and create upon; the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. I would also like to extend my acknowledgement to the Njunawal people of the Gandangara nation, whose land I had the privilege of growing up with.
