Maia Tabuteau

Wandering with Nostalgia is a celebration of the gift of reminiscing about childhood experience. I explore childhood nostalgia through painting, drawing on personal memories of play, family and the loving environment that shaped these experiences. My practice considers how childhood memories are revisited and reshaped over time, carrying both the joy of reminiscing and a sense of melancholy for experiences that cannot be returned to. Although photographs form the basis of these paintings, I enhance, abstract and morph the images into their own contexts, shifting them from reality into a fantastical realm. This spotlights the joy felt in these moments and enables me to explore the relationship between documented experiences and emotional recollections.

Painting is central to my exploration of memory because of its capacity for layering, alteration and experiments in colour. Play, to me, is a core experience of childhood, but it is also something I seek to embrace when depicting these reminisced versions of the past. By revisiting core memories from childhood, such as primary school athletics day, I aim to explore how individual memories can connect to broader experiences of growing up, belonging and developing a relationship with the world around us.