Recently I started thinking about my paintings and even my studio as being haunted: I was a ghost that was making paintings, or I’m haunted by a ghost who compels me to make them. Either way, I thought the idea of the paintings being the express wish of a disembodied being with a mysterious agenda was funny, and I tried to think about what all of the paintings might refer to if they were haunted traces left by a ghost.
Painting as the product of pure consciousness without any material reality is also silly because the body is fundamental to making them. And the idea that a ghost has been using my body to make paintings reads like a B-grade film synopsis for something I would definitely take screenshots from!
Then, because the idea of that film was so funny to me - drawing on so many tropes I enjoy, it introduced the idea that maybe a clown was making the paintings or writing the script for the film.
I arrived at the idea of the paintings working at the intersection of clown/ghost axes. I think there's something in this axis between clown and ghost that explains an emotional undercurrent in my work and a simultaneous feeling of remove that's also in the images and the way I paint them.
The ghost is barely there, obfuscating, floating away, somewhere between presence and absence and the clown sits on the other end of this spectrum — loud, physical, embodied to the point of absurdity. Where the ghost is all feeling without body, the clown is all body without dignity. I think of these two figures as emotional poles that describe the tone of my work. The ghost brings distance, melancholia, and estrangement; the clown brings awkwardness, comedy, the body as site of failure and persistence. Together they create a kind of emotional dissonance — something both funny and sad, present and withdrawn.
Amy Sillman talks about searching for what’s awkward and giving it form. That’s very close to how I work: the awkward gesture, the over-layered image, the point where a painting doesn’t quite know what it is yet. The clown and the ghost are both awkward in their own ways — both out of place, both performing presence and absence. Painting can hold those states in tension: self-conscious but sincere, material but spectral, embodied but slipping away. As an idea, this “axis between clown and ghost” gives language to something that’s often felt but not easily articulated — the way images can be simultaneously intimate and distant, ridiculous and haunted. It suggests a mode of practice that is both performative (like the clown) and reflective (like the ghost), where the act of painting becomes a kind of oscillation between body and disembodiment, humour and melancholy, gesture and residue. It’s not a fixed theory but a framework for feeling a way through contradictions — a poetics of awkwardness, presence, and haunting that has both emotional and formal implications. And it comes from a very playful process of thinking, feeling, and making that embodies those contradictions, a slightly comical idea, but the attempt to balance the tensions between ghost and clown is central to the production of the works and an underlying condition of their existence.
nettle
I associate nettle with the Middle Ages. Ubiquitous in European folklore, religious texts, and historic medicine, they live in a constellation with druidry, witchcraft, all things pagan, peppering early archetypal references for subsequent generic versions of the same, unearthed in places like Unsolved Mysteries on TV or Paranormal Romance as a category of fiction and film, and in contemporary practices of health and healing.
The medieval, for me, is less a historical reference than an image system that tolerates contradiction, permitting feelings that are devotional, comic and bodily at the same time.
My preference for wide-ranging and even disparate image references is for the different technologies of feeling, or emotional architecture, that they make available. High/low, sacred/trivial, myth/reality TV, devotion/comedy, sincerity/awkwardness all coexist in the archive: Different places to live. Melusine and Real Housewives as neighbouring technologies of longing, performance, intimacy and transformation.
Melusine as a logic of doubleness and unstable embodiment. I imagine her slithering away, although in fact(?) she flew. She becomes an interior designer. She makes curtains now - elaborate drapery, awkward objects - too emotional, too decorative. To ruche or not to ruche!? Raymondin’s turn as the serpent. It’s how he mourns her loss, slithering around in a shallow pool; lost loves, another category of “Unsolved Mysteries”; references looping back on themselves like serpents' tails.
The paintings aren’t really interested in where an image comes from, but the emotional conditions it carries with it are useful. And they are invested in the varying resolution of source imagery. Less in depiction and more in transmission. Emotion and whatever else arrives does so through blur, distortion, failed recognition, partial memory, misremembered cinema, overexposed sentiment, internet compression, TV glow, medieval flattening, decorative patterning.
Something arriving imperfectly through paint makes an equally imperfect reception possible, but a singular interpretive mode difficult: The obstacles that appear between oneself and what one wishes to approach. Difficulties of relating (of being with/ being without, frustration of longing, or desire) Forms of encounter (awkward, incomplete, characterised by delay, misunderstanding, distance or uncertainty)
You’re feeling the wind before the trees instead of feeling the wind in your hair, your bum’s in the sun but you’ve failed to signify. Unstable territory.
Between making the paintings and writing this, I am made extremely uncomfortable by running a very long way. Actually I train for a marathon while I’m making them and afterwards I run the race. Throughout it all, I’m fascinated by my own experience of discomfort.
A long run, an awkward conversation, a jellyfish sting, a painting.
Things don't seem to be universally uncomfortable or not. Rather, they exist by degree: by intensity, by coping threshold, by management strategy, by differences in perspective. And they often carry their own strange appeal and pull.
In my paintings I keep returning to images and situations that hover between discomfort and pleasure, attraction and repulsion.
They are not dramatic, but ordinary, everywhere. They seem fundamental to being alive.
Emotionally available animals trying to organise ourselves into meaning. We brush against something, then later: oh!
— Maggie Brink, 2026