Maggie Newman
Genetics aside, what forms personal identity? Why is it human nature to fall into groups? Where does passion come from and how is it shared? These are the types of questions I want to explore in my work. I make two-dimensional art, mainly with black ink, because drawing is therapeutic. I like to draw creatures whose bodies are either composed of different forms that come from my head, or of animals’ body parts. These creatures are usually alone. I don’t give them environments. I want to stir a set of questions in the viewer’s mind similar to the questions I ask every day: I want to make them wonder what made each character and what environment it belongs to. In this process, I separate a breathing thing from its world. What I hope to present to the viewer is an urge to give each character a story. I believe it’s impossible for the human mind to build a narrative completely detached from personal experience. Therefore, imagining a life for each character is, in part, a reflection of the viewer’s identity.
Being an adopted child, I’ve grown up with constant questions of self-identity. I’d study the way my friends’ families interacted and it was obvious they shared something special. The bonds between most families are inherent, from physical similarities across the board to shared mannerisms and habits. But I knew my brother and I were nothing like that, and we were nothing like mom and dad, and mom and dad were nothing like us. I spent some time being angry that I had to make diagrams about my parents’ eye colors in science class, and that I had to tell doctors I didn’t know my family history. Things like that made me feel like I was alone. But as I became more of an independent thinker, I realized how beautiful it is to celebrate individuality.
After I embraced myself as a genetic mystery, I fell in love with cultures living outside the margins of accepted society. As I develop my artistic voice, I carry this passion for subculture with me. In everyday life, and especially when I make artwork, I keep my creative influences in mind. Allen Ginsberg, a man struggling to find hope in humanity, saw flaws in America’s social identity and wrote poetry to represent everyone who didn’t fit in. Hip-Hop pioneers helped develop a powerful voice for the terribly oppressed black population of New York City. They imagined an art form more powerful and more communicative than violence. Their visions transformed into a complex, unique community driven by intellectual creativity. Gil Scott-Heron played a leading role in the birth of this culture, and like Allen Ginsberg, his words represent those he can relate to. People like Allen Ginsberg and Gil-Scott Heron inspire me. They celebrate individuality, and this celebration brings me back to my questions of identity.
Searching deep within myself helps me create my isolated characters: other work I create is driven by a contrasting mindset to answer questions about identity. As much as I want to explore identity internally, I want to explore it externally. “Externally”, to me, means the outside world: the things in life I relate to, and more specifically, the people I relate to. We absorb our surroundings in order to grow, and we move forward in life carrying tokens given to us by communities we’ve been a part of. These tokens build up and mesh together to manifest identity, whether physically or mentally. Exploring this idea in a two-dimensional practice leads me to collage work. Although these images are created on the same plane with the same ink, I call them collage because they’re collections of images I find powerfully symbolic to my own life story. These compiled images become a landscape, an environment, and a map. Each image stands as a token given to me by the communities I’ve been a part of. I reference my passion for the creative influences who have shared with me, through their art forms, unique ways to experience the world and bring the experiences back to what makes me who I am. I want the viewer to think about the outside worlds they’ve been a part of and what they’ve taken with them. I want them to think about collective, unified identity.