Artists

Maaike Anne Stevens

Shop prints
Maaike Anne Stevens

Maaike Anne Stevens studied BA at Central St Martins and graduated from Goldsmiths with a distinction in MFA in Fine Arts. She was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2010, was the winner of the Vice Magazine ‘Live Unbuttoned Campaign’ and has shown widely in London and further afield. Maaike’s work is concerned with structure and process. Her beautifully understated piece for the MA show at Goldsmiths uses a series of instructions and restraints to reduce infinite choice and possibility to a single, unpredicted yet poignant choice, realised in the form of a line of text from Don Quixote. Jealous has worked with Maaike to produce an edition of this installation in the form of a triptych, depicting the process, the resultant text, and a hand cut image that echoes the intent and feeling of the piece. Maaike explains the thought behind the print she created with Jealous: ‘A total of 1065 readers participated in this collective reading of the book Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes in which, through a process of elimination, the story was distilled to one sentence by asking people who were progressively closer to me, to give me their most resonant phrase. Physically approaching 912 strangers in the public sphere mimicked the monstrous connectivity of online communication and a shaping of our identity in response to others. The tireless repetition of the same question eventually accumulated in a final sentence that was left to me as a self-portrait through language: an unfulfilling and non-restorative answer, mirroring the madness of the novel it originated from.’ Maaike’s Jealous Prize print edition is now held in the Victoria & Albert Museum Permanent Print Collection.

Upcoming exhibitions