Artist Statement

Mya Naidoo is an artist working primarily in oil paint, watercolour, and charcoal. Her work explores the subconscious distortions of memory and familiar imagery, as a journal through her life. The idea of forgetting or misremembering is a very familiar concept to the artist. Mya often associates certain objects with a memory to keep them alive, these are usually plants from the event.

Her work distorts these plants and other related scenes into complexly layered compositions. By purposefully distorting these objects, and therefore their connected memories, she has found a way of preserving them before they change on their own. Naidoo’s favourite aspect of her work is when these abstracted compositions trigger a forgotten memory in a viewer. The goal of these pieces has developed from preserving one’s own memories, into creating something that allows others to uncover their personal subconscious distortions.

Series: Reverie

This series of oil paintings entitled Reverie, explores how the human mind can wonder into new creations from a single image. All these paintings are derived from continuously zoomed in aspects of the smallest, initial composition. Reverie, meaning “a state of imagining or thinking about pleasant things, as if you are dreaming,” describes the viewers experience of being drawn into a work, subconsciously creating their own worlds within the image in front of them. This body of work is a display of what thoughts and visualizations can be triggered in one’s mind, as they peer closer into the details of a painting. Thinking more broadly about this concept, begs the question of what miniscule elements lie within our daily lives, going unnoticed until we’re willing to see them.