Maria Bajt (b. 1974), Stockholm, Sweden
Maria Bajt began making collages in her twenties. In her preparation art school she felt that she got stuck while working with her paintings so she started to cut out pieces from them that she liked and gluedthem over onto others. Suddenly new images emerged from the old ones as she started to recycle her own works. But it was, however, during her studies at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts that she started using collage more methodically. “I got more aware of my own working process and how to construct my images in a new way.“

Maria has been influenced by “folkart”, artists like for example Henry Darger and Howard Finster, as well as by traditionally female handicrafts like quilts and other textile works. She also gets a lot of inspiration from comics.

Maria is interested in story telling and her images are often fragments of narration that are put together into longer sequences. The images grow quite intuitively from her working process but there are always a lot of choices and decisions to be made along the way. “The process can be quite slow and time demanding, but often when I make a radical change in the picture something interesting happens.”