"I just let the obsession grow and grow and grow…" @m.beauchamp.art

Credit: "INNOCENT_JPEG" Maya (Instagram @m.beauchamp.art)

Dear Diary,

My name is Maya Connie Michelle Beauchamp, I'm 23, raised in Yorkshire then Essex but I've been based in Edinburgh since 2021.

When I grew up, I loved comics. My area was tiny and I didn't really have a connection to galleries or fine art spaces as such, so my connection to the arts was through my parents who were musicians and comic book artists! I grew up with a lot of vintage games, weird music and DIY interiors. Then when I grew up and learned more about art, I was really inspired by Ghibli films and animation — I got into portraits because I wanted to be a storyteller! Then for fun I entered a wee art competition in my home town and won first place — in a category where I was the only contestant! Then I just kept making, before taking art as a subject in college. Then I just let the obsession grow and grow and grow…

Lately I'm really inspired by the aesthetics of glitches and faults, and their relationships to personal identity, queerness and 'fictioning'. It started when I was playing with a process called 'datamoshing'; where you go in and manually screw around with the makeup of files to get weird and glitchy results — or just break the file! So now I've gone from being primarily an oil painter to making digital artworks, prints, videos, animations; all that sort of thing. It's a huge jump from my more classical roots, and as I'm approaching my degree show I'm looking to blend together my painterly roots with new, digital methods. I love the fact that I'm working on methods humans can't reproduce by hand; methods that take on properties only machines can produce.

I tend to retain a very critical view of all my artworks, so it's hard to pick favourites. One of my most exhibited works has been a work called HOURGLASS FIGURE that I painted in 2024. I poured a lot of myself into it, and it was when I was obsessed with creating these sapphic alternate realms where sexuality didn't bow to or involve men. It's about 7 feet tall and meant to subconsciously invoke a human body. The colours are psychedelic and have these gorgeous, erotic figures ideas drifting in and out of misty spaces. The way you nail it to the wall it kind of intrudes into your space, floating, a little bit ghostlike. I'm very proud of it.

My favourite material to work with would depend on what I'm making. For a lot of my more 'serious' artworks recently I've loved making videos or animations by sampling and breaking files. I dubbed my process 'Datapainting', where I was making these somewhat abstracted beautiful things by drawing in data in the form of sampled pictures, radio transmissions, glitches, all kinds of things. But for my other love, the figure — I'd say charcoal or oil paint. They're so comforting and physical. I feel at peace making work with them.

I'd say I've learned so much from musicians over the last few years, especially really experimental electronic musicians! I got into learning about how SOPHIE, who was a real musical genius, synthesised sounds from scratch and considered computers an instrument in their own right. And then I got into a lot of those sounds — Puce Mary, 100 gecs, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Flying Lotus, Machine Girl, all that sort of thing. I made a playlist for my December 2024 exhibition 'kill your new computer' which is still on Spotify under the same name! So yes, weird music inspires all of my best artworks. There's magic in transforming audio to visual.

Until next time!

Maya